Re-regulating the Gambling Industry: Regulatory Reform in Victoria and New South Wales, 1999–2006

Historically, in Australia, gambling policy and regulation have been the sole responsibility of Australian State and Territory governments. However, in 1998–99 the Commonwealth commissioned an unprecedented national inquiry into gambling that was highly critical of existing gambling policies and regulatory regimes. The Productivity Commission proposed a ‘blueprint’ for an effective, independent gambling regulatory system. Seven years on, this article revisits Australian gambling regulation to present a contextualised account of regulatory reform in Victoria and New South Wales (NSW). It finds that that they have taken a markedly different approach to structural reform. Neither State has adopted the Productivity Commission's ‘ideal’ regulatory model. Reforms have been shaped by local circumstances and government priorities, rather than the regulatory principles and functions outlined by the Productivity Commission.     

Dawkins and the labor tradition: Instrumentalism and centralism in federal ALP higher education policy 1942–88

As Commonwealth Minister for Employment, Education and Training, John Dawkins has overturned prevailing methods of funding, organization and control of Australian higher education. By making funds dependent upon agreements to pursue national priorities, the Labor minister has also appeared to threaten the dominant objectives and philosophies of higher education. Recent policies (1987–88) have also been regarded as a betrayal of traditional ALP values. This paper argues that such an interpretation misrepresents the history of federal Labor policies in higher education and Dawkins' place within it Tertiary education has usually assumed prominence in the face of either actual or perceived national crises. When in office Labor has usually promoted instru‐mentalism of both an egalitarian and economic kind, and brought about an increasing centralization of Commonwealth control. Federal ALP MPs have also been ambivalent on the values of liberal education and academic freedom. On these grounds, the Dawkins policies represent more of a continuity with, than a departure from, ALP tradition. Any explanation of the Minister's political success must take into account this federal Labor heritage in higher education.     

The “Religion” Question in British Colonial and Commonwealth Censuses 1820s–2010s

Questions on “religion” in national censuses have had a long and complex history. In this article, the experiences of the British colonies and the subsequent Commonwealth countries in the conduct of census enquiries into religion are explored. Although the British government issued general instructions for the guidance of population censuses in the colonial empire, little clear advice was offered on the issue. The result was essentially a pragmatic approach, with each census commissioner responsible for the decision to include a religious question and the form and content of the published tables. Decisions taken by early census commissioners tended to be followed subsequently for the sake of maintaining continuity. In most cases smooth bureaucratic transitions at independence resulted in colonial practices being retained, unless there were pressing reasons for change. Nevertheless, the form of the question and particularly the classification scheme were susceptible to modification reflecting changing national priorities. Computerisation of the census has resulted in the widespread abandonment of open‐ended questions and the presentation of a restricted list of options, unique to each country. Commonwealth countries thus exhibit a highly flexible and diverse range of responses to recording religion.     

Regulatory Reform and the Management of Intergovernmental Relations in Australia

There have been three waves of regulatory reform in Australia since the 1980s, each informed by broadly similar neoliberal political and economic objectives, but with important differences of emphasis that reflect key priorities and changing contexts. This article argues that the second and third waves brought with them three significant developments: (1) A substantially enhanced capacity for the organisation and management of intergovernmental relations in Australia; (2) a new, national emphasis on the need for microeconomic reform, reinvigorated and broadened in the third wave by a broadening of the national ‘productivity and efficiency’ debate through the Human Capital agenda of Council of Australian Governments (COAG); and (3) markedly changed funding and policy responsibilities between the levels of government. These changes include new arrangements for intergovernmental funding; a new performance oversight body, the COAG Reform Council; a revised Intergovernmental Agreement on Federal Financial Relations; and a new role for Commonwealth ministers in chairing COAG working parties.     

Campaigning Against Apartheid: The Rise,Fall and Legacies of the South Africa United Front 1960–1962

ABSTRACT

The international struggle against apartheid that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century made the system of legalised racial oppression in South Africa one of the world’s great moral causes. Looking back at the anti-apartheid struggle, a defining characteristic was the scope of the worldwide efforts to condemn, co-ordinate, and isolate the country. In March 1961, the international campaign against apartheid achieved its first major success when Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd chose to withdraw South Africa from the Commonwealth following vocal protests at the Heads of State Summit held in London. As a consequence, it appeared albeit briefly, that external pressure would effectively serve as a catalyst for achieving far-reaching and immediate political change in South Africa. The global campaign, centred on South Africa remaining in the Commonwealth, was the first of its kind launched by South Africa’s national liberation movements, and signalled the beginning of thirty years of continued protest and lobbying. The contributions from one organisation that had a role in launching and co-ordinating this particular transnational campaign, the South Africa United Front (SAUF), an alliance of liberation groups, have been largely forgotten. Leading members of the SAUF claimed the organisation had a key part in South Africa’s subsequent exit from the Commonwealth, and the purpose of this article is to explore the validity of such assertions, as well as the role and impact it had in generating a groundswell of opposition to apartheid in the early 1960s. Although the SAUF’s demands for South Africa to leave the Commonwealth were ultimately fulfilled, the documentary evidence suggests that its campaigning activities and impact were not a decisive factor; however the long-term significance of the SAUF, and the position it had in the rise of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) has not been fully recognised. As such, the events around the campaign for South Africa’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth act as a microcosm of developments that would define the international struggle against apartheid.     

‘This Community Which Nobody Can Define’: Meanings of Commonwealth in the Late 1940s and 1950s

Assessments of early postwar understandings of the power and potential of the Commonwealth have suggested the body either failed to shield the British public from a sense of national decline or that it comforted them that there was no need to worry about decolonisation because the organisation enabled the maintenance of British authority by other means. However, historians and political scientists who provided public comment on the present and future of the body in the late 1940s and 1950s complicate such assessments, wracked as they were by a profound uncertainty over what the Commonwealth could achieve. Their sense of uncertainty was not derived from a pessimistic reading of the tangible events and processes of the period that we might today assume blunted commentators’ faith in Commonwealth cohesion, such as Britain’s relationship with Europe, neutralism, apartheid, or even Suez. Instead, uncertainty over the Commonwealth’s capacity to realise a latent potential supposedly rooted in its members’ willingness to work together was rooted in something more elemental, namely sustained uncertainty regarding the nature of the body’s connections and functions. The body was judged an abstraction, a nascent and unparalleled experiment whose bonds were extensive yet impossible to measure. Its perceived opacity rendered it neither a cause for concern nor a salve to a wounded British morale.     

Public Housing and Intergovernmental Reform in the 1990s

The problem identified in this paper is twofold. One is the plight of public housing at the end of the decade, with State programs undermined by Commonwealth funding cuts; the other is the problem of intergovernmental reform and its consequences for discrete areas of policy such as housing. The paper traces developments in CommonwealthState housing arrangements, beginning with the reforms initiated through the Council of Australian Governments through to the still uncertain future of public housing under the Howard government. It examines a number of inquiries into housing and recommendations for reform which served the plans of reformist governments intent on separating out the functional roles and responsibilities of the Commonwealth and the States. In particular, these inquiries advocated an ‘affordability’s benchmark which sought to blur the distinction between public and private rental housing leading, inevitably, to the residualisation of the public housing sector.     

Regional Planning in Queensland's Rangelands: Challenges and Prospects for Biodiversity Conservation

In Australia, the Commonwealth and State governments are increasingly devolving natural resource management (NRM) responsibilities to regional bodies. This move has led to the development of regional NRM plans. Native vegetation and biodiversity conservation, along with soil, pasture and water resources, are key components of the regional NRM plans in Queensland's extensive rangelands. This paper outlines and applies a set of criteria for evaluating the native vegetation and biodiversity content of accredited regional NRM plans for Queensland's rangelands. The evaluation showed considerable variation in the comprehensiveness of the information and knowledge base and management action targets among plans, including the poor articulation of impacts of excessive grazing pressure on biodiversity. The NRM plans lacked effective integration of natural resource, native vegetation and biodiversity conservation targets and actions. Several regions had too many biodiversity targets, many of which were poorly integrated. This is symptomatic of a limited understanding of rangelands as ecological systems and the lack of an integrated planning framework. We conclude regional NRM planning is not a ‘silver bullet’ for biodiversity conservation in the rangelands, but rather, it is the beginning of a long road to address complex, multi‐scale problems at a regional level.     

Judging government economic performance

ABSTRACT

The macroeconomic theory of judging contends that when justices on courts of last resort consider cases involving their governments and economic issues their voting behaviour will be affected by the state of the economy. Using decisions from the High Court of Australia from 1970 through 2018, the findings suggest that both economic conditions, particularly inflation and the GDP growth rate, and the partisan identity of the Commonwealth government affect the Commonwealth’s probability of winning economic cases. The High Court’s behaviour is consistent with an institution that is part of the national policymaking system and is responsive to the state of the economy.     

Breaking the Bad News: Plans for the Announcement to the Empire of the Death of Elizabeth II and the Proclamation of Her Successor, 1952–67

This article uses recently released official papers to examine British planning for the announcement of the death of Elizabeth II to the Empire/Commonwealth, and for the involvement of Commonwealth representatives in the proclamation of her successor. The planning process was complicated by the complex and varied nature of the relationship between the Crown and different parts of both the colonial Empire and the independent Commonwealth. While the debates generated by this process tended to revolve around relatively minor issues of protocol, they were informed by a much more serious concern: the extent to which the institution of the British monarchy should adapt to meet the needs of the ‘new’ Commonwealth. Those advocating flexibility saw this as essential if the Crown was to continue to have a unifying role within the Commonwealth. Traditionalists, however, feared that reform would weaken the value of the monarchy as the focus of a specifically British national identity.     

In the National Interest: Dominions' Support for Britain and the Commonwealth after the Second World War

Was British confidence that the Commonwealth could bolster its international status and extend its global reach after the Second World War a product of self-delusion or nostalgia? This paper examines three crucial aspects of relations between Britain and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in the 1940s – diplomacy, economics and defence – to show the extensive and tangible support that the ‘old dominions’ extended to Britain. They opted to back Britain because it served their individual national interests well. British hopes that the post-war Commonwealth would be an effective association were founded on ample evidence, although the British desire to lead and dominate was confounded by the fact that Ottawa, Canberra, Wellington and Pretoria were national centres in their own right.     

When Does Government Listen to the Public? Voluntary Associations and Dynamic Agenda Representation in the United States

The aim of the article is to examine how the population size of voluntary associations affects the process through which the public's issue priorities are translated into policy priorities. We conduct a time series analysis of political attention in executive and legislative agendas at the U.S. federal level in the period 1971–2001, covering all issues addressed by the U.S. government. We show that the number of voluntary associations in a policy area has a positive conditioning effect on the link between public priorities and attention for the president's State of the Union Address. However, our results do not find a positive effect for voluntary associations at later stages of the policy cycle, which experience a higher degree of institutional friction. The findings underline the importance of distinguishing between different stages of policymaking when considering the impact of voluntary associations on dynamic agenda responsiveness.     

Free Trade Empire to Commonwealth of Nations: India,Britain and Imperial Preference, 1903–1932

This article examines the dialogue between British tariff reformers and Indian nationalists over the application of imperial trade preference in India from Joseph Chamberlain's 1903 Birmingham address to the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference. For both groups, this issue was a focal point to assess India's constitutional status and national participation within an emerging British Commonwealth and international system after the First World War. Specifically, it marked a comprehensive challenge to the orthodoxy of free trade and liberal empire seen increasingly as a determent to reconciling national prosperity and imperial unity. It is argued that prominent tariff reformers’ well-studied criticism of an ‘unpatriotic’ cosmopolitan free trade made them also sympathetic to longstanding Indian grievances that this fiscal policy exacerbated economic exploitation and racial discrimination. After 1919, Indian nationalists, including ‘historical economists’, utilized metropolitan advocacy for imperial preference to demand fiscal and political autonomy from Britain and national, as well as racial, equality in collective imperial decision. At the 1932 conference in Ottawa, India's voluntary and negotiated acceptance of preferential trade with Britain, beside the white self-governing Dominions, helped transform the British Commonwealth into an egalitarian organization recognizable after 1947.     

An Amnesty Assessed. Human Impact on Shipwreck Sites: the Australian Case.

In 1993 a nationwide amnesty was declared in Australia, calling for members of the public who were in possession of historic shipwreck relics to declare them to their respective State cultural heritage management agencies. The amnesty was instituted in response to an amendment in the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976 , which introduced 'blanket protection' for all shipwrecks and associated relics in Commonwealth waters which were at least 75 years old. This paper reports on a recent assessment of the process, consequences and implications of the amnesty, and discusses the significance of the results.
© 2008 The Author     

The Proliferation of Identity Politics in Australia: An Analysis of Ministerial Portfolios, 1970-2000

Since the 1970s, Australian State and Commonwealth governments have entered the area of social identity, addressing issues associated with groups identified in terms of social cleavages, such as race or gender, rather than class. This article analyses social identity activity in each jurisdiction in terms of patterns of growth, innovation, emulation and commitment, and finds that the entry of governments into social identity politics has been characterised by diversity. Analysis shows that State behaviour is not explained by general characteristics, such as demographics, partisanship and institutional factors, but by State-specific factors, such as the contemporary political environment, influence of Premiers and political culture. Despite diversity in the emergence of social identity politics, activity in most jurisdictions has stabilised, suggesting that this new area of activity is an enduring extension to the role of Australian governments.     

The Commonwealth and South Africa: From Smuts to Mandela

The creation of modern South Africa as an independent unitary state within the British Empire (c. 1910) gave birth to the Commonwealth idea. Jan Smuts’s views on Commonwealth were formative and they continued to inform the evolution of the organisation until the end of the Second World War. Also significant was the role played by Afrikaner nationalist leader J. B. M. Hertzog, who exerted a critical influence on the 1926 Balfour Declaration and Statute of Westminster. At the point of South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, the Commonwealth divided between new entrants, who cast South Africa as a pariah, and older member states who lamented the exit of a troubled family member. Even after South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, apartheid’s significance as the global exemplar of institutionalised racism and colonial rule helped to bind the Commonwealth as a multi-racial organisation with strongly defined ethical values. South Africa’s reintegration in 1994, with Nelson Mandela to the fore, was welcomed as a triumph for the Commonwealth. Paradoxically, however, this proved a pyrrhic victory and may actually have contributed to the Commonwealth’s state of indirection.     

Are you willing to be made nothing? Is Commonwealth reform possible?

A new round of Commonwealth reform proposals commenced at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting of 2009. An ensuing report, titled A Commonwealth of the people: time for urgent reform, contained a long list of proposals that eventually resulted in 2013 in the adoption of the Commonwealth Charter. Many classic international organizations are in need of reform, but this is, of course, challenging. This new Commonwealth reform process will not lead to satisfying changes and will not make it a more relevant actor in global governance. The year 2015 marks the Commonwealth Secretariat's first half‐century. We take this symbolic marker to push for a forward‐looking exercise, arguing that because the true nature of the Commonwealth is often misunderstood, a better understanding of the organization is essential before embarking on any successful change‐management project. In the article we identify four different kinds of Commonwealth: three of a ‘formal’ nature (the official, bureaucratic and the people's Commonwealth) and a fourth ‘informal’ one (Commonwealth Plus). By describing the potential of these four different kinds of Commonwealth, we can anticipate better the challenges with which the Commonwealth network is faced, both internal (including its mandate, its British imperial past and dominance, the organization's leadership and its membership) and external (other international organizations, other Commonwealths, rivalry with regional organizations and the rise of global policy networks). Consequently, this should lead to a better and more sustainable debate about the Commonwealth's future role in global governance.     

‘This is Staffordshire not Alabama’: Racial Geographies of Commonwealth Immigration in Early 1960s Britain

In the 1964 general election, the English town of Smethwick outside Birmingham became infamous for the unprecedented way in which issues of immigration, race and racism entered British national politics. Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths captured the Smethwick seat in Parliament from long-standing Labour MP Patrick Gordon Walker, aided by the slogan ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour’—a watershed episode soon overshadowed by the rise of Powellism in the late 1960s. Debates between Griffiths, his supporters and his opponents in the early to mid-1960s about the local and national implications of ‘coloured’ immigration (particularly of Indian Sikhs) from the Commonwealth and the legacy of empire drew upon a densely entangled set of global reference points that went beyond a ‘multi-racial’ Britain being reshaped by its ‘multi-racial’, postcolonial Commonwealth. Racist rhetoric, as well as an increasingly assertive anti-racist activism by the Indian Workers' Association and other groups, turned to analogies ranging from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa and racial segregation in the United States, as well as to protest techniques inspired by Gandhi in colonial India and African Americans in the civil rights movement. In Smethwick c. 1964, the global met the local, illuminating transnational flows of people and ideas about race and cultural diversity nonetheless contingent upon their time and place.     

The Rhetorical Framing of Policy Intervention

When prime ministers speak, the nation usually listens. In the Australian federation, prime ministers have consistently used the power of their political pulpit to launch policy interventions into areas of traditional State responsibility. This article suggests that there is an emerging rhetorical pattern to the way these policy interventions are presented. Prime ministers of both major parties have used rhetoric to portray the Commonwealth as acting on behalf of the legitimate interests of constituents who have been ignored by State governments. Occurring in close proximity to federal elections, policy interventions are shown to be weapons which favour incumbent prime ministers in their battles with State governments and federal oppositions alike.