The Politics of Broadband: Labor and New Information Technology from Hawke to Gillard

Labor's broadband policy influenced key regional independents to support the formation of the minority Gillard government. However, analysing information technology policy doesn't only demonstrate continuing differences between Labor and the Coalition. It also demonstrates changing Labor attitudes on issues ranging from neoliberalism, globalisation and social inclusion to conceptions of market failure and the rising power of Asia. In particular, this article compares and contrasts the attitudes of the Rudd government to those of the Hawke and Keating governments, arguing that the Rudd government placed much more emphasis on the role that market failure had played in contributing to Australia's poor broadband provision. The resulting policy involved an increased role for government in rolling out broadband not only to the cities but also to regional Australia. That approach benefitted Gillard. It also reflected ideological differences between not just Labor and the Liberals, but also between Rudd and his Labor predecessors.     

Macro‐ethno‐economics

William S. Hall and Roy O. Freedle. Culture and Language: The Black American Experience. New York: Halsted Press, 1975. 191 pp. Tables, figures, bibliography and index. $10.95.     

Language life or language death: A matter of perspective in an endangered linguistics

Lamb, Sydney M. and E. Douglas Mitchell, eds. Sprung from Some Common Source: Investigations into the Prehistory of Languages. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. xii + 411 pages, hardcover $45.00.

Robins, R. H. and E. M. Uhlenbeck, eds. Endangered Languages. New York: Berg Publishers, 1992. xiv + 273 pages, hardcover $39.50.     

Excavation of a pre-Conquest Cemetery at Addingham,West Yorkshire

EXCAVATIONS at Addingham in Wharfedale uncovered part of a cemetery which, on the evidence of radiocarbon analysis, can be dated to the 8th to 10th centuries A.D. At that period Addingham was an estate of the archbishops of York, and it was to here that Archbishop Wulfhere fled in 867 to escape the Danes. A total of 55 graves were investigated, yielding the remains of perhaps 80 individuals. Of these, about 40 wert undisturbed primary interments; the rest had been reburied in whole or part, leaving some graves empty and others containing several individuals. Later features included a ditch and a drying kiln which belonged to a post-Conquest manorial complex. Further details on the layout and components of the settlement have been gleaned from earthwork survey, geophysical prospection and documentary research, as well as from earlier excavations which until now remained unpublished.     

Commemoration versus Vergangenheitsbewaltigung: Contextualizing Austria's Gedenkjahr 2005

This essay explores the politics of memory in post-1945 Austrianpolitical culture, focusing on the shift between the fiftiethanniversary of the Anschluss and the sixtieth anniversary ofthe end of the Second World War. Postwar Austrian society experienceda particular tension associated with the Nazi past, manifestedin communicative and cultural forms of memory. On the one hand,the support of many for the Third Reich—expressed throughactive or passive complicity—threatened to link Austriawith the perpetrator status reserved for German society. Onthe other, the Allies' Moscow Declaration (1943) created a mythof victimization by Germany that allowed Austrians to avoidconfronting difficult questions concerning the Nazi era. Consequently,discussion of Austrian involvement in National Socialism becamea taboo subject during the initial decades of the Second Republic.The 2005 commemoration is notable insofar as it marked a significantbreak with this taboo. New forms of cultural memory expressedin 2005 are examined here as the culmination of two things:first, criticism from the centre and left of the Austrian politicalspectrum that began during the Waldheim Affair of the mid-1980sand the 1988 commemoration; second, efforts by successive SocialDemocratic chancellors and certain federal party leaders, beginningin the early 1990s, to break the pervasive silence that madeVergangenheitsbewältigung difficult, and to challenge theAustrian right wing's glorification of elements of the Nazipast. This process included the novel step of acknowledgingthe Nazi skeletons in the Social Democratic Party's own cupboard.     

Masculinity,place and a binary discourse of ‘theory’ and ‘empirical investigation’ in the human geography of Aotearoa/New Zealand

This paper discusses a binary discourse of ‘theory’ and ‘empirical investigation’ in the human geography practised in Aotearoa (New Zealand)[1]. I attempt to illustrate the way in which such dichotomous thinking articulates with the social construction of a hegemonic masculinity to effect a specific geographic understanding of the world. I suggest that this theory/empirical investigation binary gives rise to at least three significant problems in geographic research: a gendered and hierarchical structuring of geographic thought, a devaluation of the feminised term in the binary, and unworkable ‘mobile positioning’ of the researcher.     

Risk and the Sacred: Environment,Media and Public Opinion in Bali

This exploration of controversies over environmental regulation in the Indonesian province of Bali traces the relationship between the media, environmental attitudes and Balinese identity, focusing on the religious dimension of that identity and the ways in which this has become bound up with conceptions of environmental imbalance and a popular critique of capitalist development on the island. The fusion of cultural and environmental metaphors of ‘erosion’ and ‘preservation’ in public discourse is striking in the Balinese case, since sites of great spiritual significance are also attractive to investors for their aesthetic appeal and heritage value (Verschuuren et al. 2010). From the earliest emergence of environmental conflict on the island, the emotive power of cultural identity became intimately connected with environmental politics. This article traces several of the pervasive and interconnected dichotomies ‐ sacred and profane, cultural value and economic interest, environmental preservation and use (exploitation), certainty and uncertainty (risk) ‐ that characterise debates surrounding environmental regulation and development on the island.