Australian defence policy and the possibility of war

The Defence White Paper of December 2000 declares that the main task of the ADF is to maintain the capability to defend Australian territory from any credible attack without relying on the combat forces of any other country. Australia is unusual among contemporary Western states in affirming such a policy. Most other states are reordering their priorities to put less emphasis on conventional conflict and more on tasks such as peacekeeping and border protection, while assuming that in the event of major conventional conflicts they are likely to be involved as subsidiary members of a coalition led in most cases by the United States. Should Australia follow this trend? The article reviews this question in the light of a number of scenarios for the use of Australia's armed forces in the period ahead, and concludes that the arguments for change are not persuasive.     

In defence of the Indo-Pacific: Australia's new strategic map

The 2013 Australian Defence White Paper categorically termed Australia's zone of strategic interest the Indo-Pacific, the first time any government has defined its region this way. This raises questions about what the Indo-Pacific means, whether it is a coherent strategic system, the provenance of the concept and its implications for Asian security as well as Australian policy. Indo-Pacific Asia can best be understood as an expansive definition of a maritime super-region centred on South-East Asia, arising principally from the emergence of China and India as outward-looking trading states and strategic actors. It is a strategic system insofar as it involves the intersecting interests of key powers such as China, India and the USA, although the Indo-Pacific subregions will retain their own dynamics too. It suits Australia's two-ocean geography and expanding links with Asia, including India. The concept is, however, not limited to an Australian perspective and increasingly reflects US, Indian, Japanese and Indonesian ways of seeing the region. It also reflects China's expanding interests in the Indian Ocean, suggesting that the Chinese debate may shift towards partial acceptance of Indo-Pacific constructs alongside Asia-Pacific and East Asian ones, despite suspicions about its association with the US rebalance to Asia. Questions about Australia's ability to implement an effective Indo-Pacific strategy must account for force posture, alliance ties and defence diplomacy, as well as constraints on force structure and spending.     

澳大利亚福利制度的形成

澳大利亚社会保障和福利制度是自20世纪初澳大利亚联邦成立以来的一项基本国策,福利制度的形成是澳大利亚社会改革和现代化发展的重要内容与特征之一。具有本土化扬弃功能的澳大利亚民族意识使这一移植于英国的“舶来品”植根于澳洲,进而形成适合于澳大利亚社会、拥有澳大利亚特色的社会制度,影响深远。     

Public policy in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This paper surveys the contribution that articles on public policy have made to this journal in its first half-century. To help organise those contributions, the paper makes a rough distinction between works of a primarily explanatory nature and those that can be thought of as having a substantive focus on analysing particular policy areas or issues. It observes the paucity of policy studies in the 1960s and 1970; the rapid rise in the 1980s; and a plateauing and even perhaps decline after that. It notes the desultory interest in theoretical questions and welcome attempts to employ the comparative method.     

左、李塞防与海防之争新论

清同治、光绪年间,统治阶级内部在国防部署上曾有过一次塞防与海防之争.海防派以李鸿章为首,认为东南沿海千里海防是国防重点,主张弃新疆,专注海防.塞防派以左宗棠为首,主张塞防、海防并重,强调新疆在国防上的重要地位,坚决要求收复新疆.这场争论的实质是国防前线的战略部署和国家有限的财力如何分配;争论的焦点则是收复新疆还是放弃新疆.这场争论是公开的、正常的,其主张有正确与错误之分,其见解有高低之别,但不是爱国与卖国之争,不应因此给李鸿章戴上卖国或投降主义的帽子.     

International mediation and Australian foreign policy: building institutional capacity to respond to overseas conflict

In October 2012, Australia's parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade recommended that a mediation support unit should be created within the Australian Agency for International Development, a department now amalgamated with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The question is: Does Australia possess the motivation and capacity to implement active and effective international mediation by building the capacity of intermediaries to deploy various peacemaking methods to hasten de-escalation at different stages of a conflict? If not, is a mediation support unit an appropriate initiative to address this capability gap? This article draws on quantitative conflict data sets and an expert panel to conclude that Australia's track record demonstrates significant capacity to undertake international mediation, but that the mediation personnel and processes available to government are insufficiently resourced and coordinated to readily provide policymakers with accessible tools to undertake the diverse range of mediation strategies advocated by conflict scholars. While a mediation support unit would address some of these issues, at present it conflicts with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's institutional philosophy based on diffused expertise.     

Australian foreign policy and news media: national identity and the sale of uranium to India and China

This article explores the utility of a constructivist-media communications approach to understanding the production of national identity in Australia through a case study of the Australian Labor Party's 2011 decision to allow uranium sales to India. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were increasingly concerned with India and China, as ‘rising’ superpowers whose prominence offered opportunities for economic prosperity even as it undermined settled regional power balances. This article finds that, rather than a matter of rational strategy, the decision was made in a context of considerable anxiety about the ‘Asian century’ as the Australian public, politicians and policymakers struggled to comprehend geopolitical change. It further argues that the constructivist project in international relations can benefit from engaging with insights from media and communications methodologies and by taking a less hierarchical approach to ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ discursive agency.     

The foreign policy of First Republic Italy: new approaches

This introductory article deals with the most recent contributions by Italian historians on the Italian Republic's international role. It aims mainly to demonstrate that a new generation of younger Italian historians is successfully offering new views and interpretations on First Republic Italy's role in the international system, and is also focusing on aspects such as the culture of Italy's political parties, the economic dimension, the role of public opinion, and the influence of external actors on domestic Italian politics – in short, that there has been a turn away from traditional diplomatic history based upon the archives of the Foreign Ministry.     

吕海寰与清末国防述略

吕海寰曾在甲午战争、日俄战争和英军侵藏等关键时刻,积极参与有关国防的各种活动,针对时局世变与各种具体问题,提出了一系列客观见解和切实可行的办法,体现出强烈的爱国情怀.这样一位在中国近代史上起过重要作用的历史人物一直未能得到学界的重视,这是不应该的.     

Valence and spatial explanations for voting in the 2013 Australian election

This article examines the 2013 Australian federal election to test two competing models of vote choice: spatial politics and valence issues. Using data from the 2013 Australian Election Study, the analysis finds that spatial politics (measured by party identification and self-placement on the left–right spectrum) and valence issues both have significant effects on vote choice. Spatial measures are more important than valence issues in explaining vote choice, however, in contrast with recent studies from Britain, Canada and the USA. Explanations for these differences are speculative, but may relate to Australia's stable party and electoral system, including compulsory voting and the frequency of elections. The consequently high information burden faced by Australian voters may lead to a greater reliance on spatial heuristics than is found elsewhere.

本文研究了2013年澳大利亚联邦选举,以检验两种竞争的投票选择：空间政治和共价议题。作者使用了2013年澳大利亚选举数据进行分析,发现空间政治（用政党认同和左右光谱自定位来测量）和共价议题都对选举的选择有重要影响。不过,空间测量比共价议题更能解释投票的选择,这和英国、加拿大及美国近年的研究形成对照。对这些差异的解释是推理性的,但跟澳大利亚稳定的政党及选举制度有关,包括义务投票、选举频率之类。澳大利亚选民面临着沉重的信息负担,由此而导致了对空间启发的依赖要大于其他地方。     

International relations and foreign policy in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

The Australian Journal of Political Science (AJPS) has evolved from a publication that deliberately relegated articles in international relations (IR) to a secondary status to one that has defined and encouraged leading-edge contributions to that field. This development can be attributed to successive AJPS editorial teams’ realisation that contemporary political problems are increasingly interconnected and that emerging approaches to IR reflect this condition. Several recent and key IR debates that have emerged within the journal’s pages are assigned special attention here: the linking of Australia’s domestic politics to that country’s foreign policy interests and behaviour; in-depth discussions that relate to ongoing trends in the international political economy; critical analysis of national defence and regional security postures; and diverse theoretical perspectives that are increasingly shaping the IR field’s paradigmatic identity. It is concluded that the AJPS is now a leading source of IR thought and discourse.     

Brutes, beasts and empire: veterinary medicine and environmental policy in French North Africa and British India

The deep, and persistent, colonial roots of many contemporary environmental policies around the world have been increasingly recognized over the last decade. Research in the sectors of agriculture, forestry, human medicine, and public health has illuminated how environmental policies were constructed and utilized during the colonial period, as well as how many of these policies remain influential today. This paper examines the as yet little explored contribution of colonial veterinary medicine to the development and implementation of environmental policy. By comparing the experiences of the French in North Africa and the British in India, it demonstrates that some colonial veterinarians had a great deal of influence on environmental policy while others had very little. In French North Africa veterinarians played a significant role in developing rangeland management policies that impacted large swaths of these three territories, policies that can still be felt today. In British India, by contrast, the role of colonial veterinarians in developing environmental policy was much more circumscribed and, in the end, largely inconsequential. The paper suggests that three primary factors account for most of this dissimilarity: the differences in animal diseases present in India and the Maghreb; the differences between French and British veterinary education before the twentieth century; and the differences in colonial administration between the two European powers.     

The Australian mining tax and the political power of business

This article provides a detailed analysis of the Australian Labor government's mining tax, building on recent debates that critique Lindblom's Politics and markets. We argued that the case illustrates the power of big business, in particular the importance of the relative flexibility of large companies, especially in the form of ‘investment strikes’, although such a strategy is more constrained in the resource sector. We also explore two other key factors. First, we analyse Lindblom's argument that government has resources which big business needs, and suggest that this argument depends on governments being competent in negotiations with large companies. We find that the claim did not apply to the case of the mining tax. Second, we analyse his view that business power owes a great deal to the manipulation of citizens' ‘volitions’. We find some evidence to support this claim, but again suggest that the failure of the government to effectively make the case for a mining tax helped business.

本文就最近有关林德·布罗姆《政治与市场》一书的辩论,对澳大利亚工党政府的矿业税做了详尽的分析。笔者指出,矿业税说明了大企业的力量,尤其是大公司的相对灵活性,特别是他们的“投资罢工”,尽管在资源部门这种策略受到了扼制。笔者还探讨了另外两个关键因素。第一个是林德·布罗姆观点,即政府有大企业所需的资源。此论的根据是政府有能力与大公司讨价还价。笔者认为,这种说法并不适用于矿业税。第二个是,林德·布罗姆认为企业力量很大程度要受公民“意志”的左右。此说有一定根据,但政府未能搞定矿业税则帮了企业。     

Geography in Higher Education in Australia

Within the last 30 years, geographical information systems (GIS) have been used increasingly in the training of geographers. On the basis of the philosophy of technology and instrumental genesis, we sketch how the use of instruments interacts with learning processes and outline how this can be studied. We empirically analyse students' learning processes and the influences of teaching practice in an introductory course in GIS. We show that students have different strategies for creating their personal instrument for spatial thinking and how teaching interacts with the students' learning processes. Finally, we discuss how GIS may gradually alter future professional development of geographers.     

Partisanship,policy entrepreneurs and the market for ideas: what we can learn from policy failure

ABSTRACT

The Office of Living Victoria (OLV), was established in 2011 by the then Liberal-National Party Coalition Government. It was created in response to a water crisis and intended to revolutionise water management and delivery, challenging established authorities and practices consolidated under the previous Labor government in Victoria. There was a decidedly partisan motivation for its conception. The drive for new ideas and innovation created opportunities for policy entrepreneurs who won the competition against more conventional research advocacy, and determined the agenda of the new agency, in the process curbing an existing policy network. Yet within a short period, this initiative was mired in scandal, and ended in 2014 having failed to achieve its purposes. This article explores this instance of policy failure, assessing the policy trajectory of the OLV in relation to the concepts of partisanship, policy entrepreneurship, and policy networks.