The Dynamics of Environmental Issues in Australia: Concerns,Clusters and Carriers

Recent survey (AES and ISSP) data and public opinion polls show an interesting dynamic at work in public opinion on environmental issues in Australia. Environmental concerns lose urgency, detach themselves from environmental groups, their established issue-carriers, and further bifurcate into distinct 'green' and 'brown' issue clusters. These shifts in patterns of concern accompany changes in forms of public expression and in the diffusion of concerns. However, public concerns about the environment in Australia do not simply wane, but become 'routinised', that is, increasingly differentiated, independent of green groups, and linked with conventional institutional issue carriers.     

ERZGEBIRGE TIN: A CLOSER LOOK

Summary. The publication of Muhly's Copper and Tin in 1973 was an important contribution to the study of the metals trade in antiquity. However, in his section on Central and Eastern European tin ore deposits, he ruled out the possibility, on geological grounds, that the Erzgebirge might be a source of tin ore in the Bronze Age. This paper is not in agreement with this conclusion, and attempts to reinstate the Erzgebirge as a viable source of tin in antiquity.     

The limited capacity of management to rescue UK defence policy: a review and a word of caution

Political and media attention in the UK is devoted to three interrelated aspects of defence: policy, the management of defence resources and military operations. This article argues that the 1998 Strategic Defence Review placed excessive reliance on anticipated improvements in the management of defence resources to render Labour's defence policies affordable. The field of attempted defence management improvements is surveyed and it is concluded that no final answers were generated on the key issues of the division of tasks among uniformed personnel, civil servants and the private sector, or on whether defence should be run largely on a capability basis or on single service lines. Given the demonstrated similarity between the government's concepts of the UK's role in the world in the Strategic Defence Review (1998) and the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) (2010), there is a clear danger that the SDSR also relies too much on efficiency savings. By reference to the inherent complications of defence management and to three strands of management thought (complexity management, wicked problems and principal–agent theory), the article argues that some inefficiency will always be present. It suggests that the Clausewitzian concept of friction, accepted as pertinent to the area of military operations, might also be applied to efforts to generate military capability. It concludes that defence reviews should not be based on assumptions about efficiency savings and that students of international security and defence need to pay attention to both the volume of resources going into defence and the mechanisms by which they are managed.     

Geographic location and Aboriginal economic status: a census-based analysis of outstations in the Northern Territory

The demographic and economic characteristics of Aboriginal people in Australia's remotest locations are examined from 1986 Census data. There are three objectives: first to argue the case for examining Aboriginal society in spatial context: second, to demonstrate how census data can be manipulated to isolate meaningful spatial sub-categories; third to consider the extent to which extreme remote location is associated with distinct social and economic characteristics. The conclusion is that on the whole, remote location is reflected in lower economic status but not in demographic structure.