State budget outcomes and Australian state politics revisited: The impact of parties

This research note reviews work by Gerritscn on budget outputs in Australian States, and more specifically on the explanatory significance of Labor and non‐Labor parties in office. It also extends his work by introducing a comparative dimension across time. This consists of comparison of the findings for the period Gerritsen saidied (1979/80–1982/83) with a later period (1985/86–1987/88) to assess the impact of partisan change in Slate governments on their relative budget efforts. The findings offer more support for the partisanship hypothesis than Gerritsen's allowed, by virtue of the findings for Western Australia and Tasmania. It concludes that though budget efforts are structured by a number of factors, partisanship nevertheless appears a potent explanatory variable.     

Initiative resistance: The welfare state

So long as the main forces holding together the postwar welfare state remained in place, the range of significant social policy options was only marginal or incremental. In that context the history of Australian political culture was plausibly construed as a utilitarian, pragmatic affair lacking significant contests of ideas, dogmas or principles. This paper examines the origins of this historiography in the birth of political science in the 1950s and suggests that the end of the cold war and the destabilising of the welfare state has exposed the limits of its serviceability. A larger appreciation of the history of Australian political thought—once associated with the theme of ‘initiative and resistance'—needs to be recovered, especially if political scientists are to make a more creative contribution to the now fundamental social policy debates over the role of the state in the economy.     

The changing nature of the Australian welfare state: A critical analysis of the ACOSS campaign to increase the Newstart Allowance

The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) is Australia's leading welfare advocacy group. During 2011–13, ACOSS coordinated a high-profile campaign to lift the rate of the Newstart allowance for the unemployed. The campaign used a number of advocacy strategies such as policy reports, petitions, media releases, support from other key interest groups and consultations with parliamentarians, but was unsuccessful in persuading the Labor government to amend the payment rate. This article argues that the campaign was always going to struggle to succeed given the Australian welfare state's historical preference for labour market engagement over broader social rights. Other barriers included the budget deficit, the increasing influence of social-investment philosophy which prioritises active rather than passive social protection, the general international trend towards payment conditionality and the challenge of advocating policy change against combined opposition from the two major political parties.

澳大利亚社会服务委员会是该国首要的一个福利促进团体。在2011年到2013年间,该团体组织了一场很高调的运动,要求提高失业人员的补贴。该运动采取了一系列促进措施,如政策报告、请愿、媒体发布、争取其他重要利益群体的支持、接触国会议员等等,但未能说服工党政府修改支付率。鉴于澳大利亚福利政府历史上一向重劳动力市场的约定而轻广泛的社会权利,该运动也就总在奋斗不辍。其他障碍包括预算赤字、社会投资哲学（优先积极而非消极的社会保护）日增的影响、薪酬限制的国际大趋势、促进针对两个主要反对党联盟的政策改变的问题,等等。     

Sub‐state nationalism and the welfare state: Québec and Canadian federalism

ABSTRACT. This article examines the relationship between sub‐state nationalism and the welfare state through the case of Québec in Canada. It argues that social policy presents mobilisation and identity‐building potential for sub‐state nationalism, and that nationalist movements affect the structure of welfare states. Nationalism and the welfare state revolve around the notion of solidarity. Because they often involve transfers of money between citizens, social programmes raise the issue of the specific community whose members should exhibit social and economic solidarity. From this perspective, nationalist movements are likely to seek the congruence between the ‘national community’ (as conceptualised by their leaders) and the ‘social community’ (the community where redistributive mechanisms should operate). Moreover, the political discourse of social policy lends itself well to national identity‐building because it is typically underpinned by collective values and principles. Finally, pressures stemming from sub‐state nationalism tend to reshape the policy agenda at both the state and the sub‐state level while favouring the asymmetrical decentralisation of the welfare state.     

Explaining the growth of government expenditure: Australian government department appropriations since world war two

Political economists have concentrated on explaining the growth of total government expenditure rather than individual governmental institutions. This paper applies four models of governmental behaviour from the public administration and public choice areas to the growth of the major Australian government departments in the period 1947–1979, and provides forecasts of expenditure for the years 1980–1982. The three models are: budgetary incrementalism, based on the auto‐correlation of departmental appropriations; the degree of bureaucratic monopoly power vis‐a‐vis its financial sponsor; a macro model incorporating social, political and economic incentives for governmental expenditure (e.g. unemployment); and a model based on measurements of the demand of the median voter for government services. The results suggest that a simple budgetary incrementalism model, using a first order autoregression provides the best explanation for institutional growth over the past thirty years and the best forecasts.     

Making Space: Women's urban and rural activism and the Australian state

Recent discussions of political actions have emphasised the ways that strategic use of spaces, places and various spatial scales helps to constitute activist practice. Advancing their interests involves activists in spatial practices that seek simultaneously to achieve cohesion and identity for their group, and to negotiate the shifting 'opportunity structures' of their context. In this article, the authors use examples of Australian women's activism in urban and rural contexts to show (1) the spatial processes with which activist groups have negotiated their strategic identities, and (2) how activist groups have constructed their politics spatially with reference to the opportunities presented by the Australian state of the early to mid-1990s. The urban activism discussed is that of parents (primarily women) contesting the quality of children's services in an outer suburban Melbourne municipality; the rural activism is that of the national Women in Agriculture movement, seeking increased recognition of the roles of women in agricultural occupations and sectors. The article elaborates on how the groups have mobilised to develop their constituencies within the contexts of the Australian state of the time, using different spaces and sites, finding appropriate languages and bureaucratic targets, and making a space for their concerns politically, symbolically and materially.     

Benchmarking in Geography: Some implications for assessing dissertations in the undergraduate curriculum

Internationally there is concern about assessment standards and the qualities of graduating students. In the UK this is resulting in the introduction of benchmarking by disciplinary communities, including that of geography. In that context the authors report on a project across social science disciplines, including geography, in one UK university, to examine and improve the assessment of undergraduate dissertations. The project examined what assessment criteria are currently published to students and identified some sources of inconsistency in applying them. It identified some potential core criteria and recommended ways of increasing transparency in applying them, so as to reduce inconsistencies and potential unfairness in marking. Implications for geography departments and the international disciplinary community are suggested and for the benchmarking exercise in British geography.     

Father and Ford revisited: gender, class and employment change in the new millennium

In the last decade in Britain the combination of women's continued entry into the labour market and the restructuring of welfare provision has exacerbated the growing demands on individuals and households in their allocation of time between productive and reproductive labour and the contradictions between the two spheres, as well as time and income inequalities between the rich and the poor. Since the election of the new Labour government in 1997, the concept of work/life balance, as well as a range of other policies to address these divisions have been introduced. This paper addresses the nature of the changes in the last decade, through the perspective of gender and class divisions and critically assesses key debates about the changing nature of working life as well as current policy provisions to support the increasing individualization of employment.