Australian Labor and the Socialist Tradition

Amidst the turmoil of the so‐called ‘death of socialism’, both in Australia and elsewhere, there has been renewed debate about what socialism should be taken to mean. This paper attempts to come to terms with the competing claims about, in particular, socialism within the Australian Labor Party and, in general, how better to understand the meaning of socialism. A comparison and contrast between the first principles of liberalism and socialism helps to illuminate some of the inadequacies of Marxist criticisms of parliamentary Labor. In addition, the argument is made that if we are willing to give greater emphasis to questions of means and ends, socialism can be seen to be part of Labor's historic mission. Far from being a defence of the Hawke administration, however, the case is made that there has been, under Hawke, a fundamental break with the democratic socialist tradition; that the difference is in kind, not degree.     

From Sorcery to Laboratory: Pandemics and Yanyuwa Experiences of Viral Vulnerability

The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted renewed attention among health professionals, Aboriginal community leaders, and social scientists to the need for culturally responsive preventative health measures and strategies. This article, a collaborative effort, involving Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola and two anthropologists with whom Yanyuwa have long associations, tracks the story of pandemics from the perspective of Aboriginal people in the Gulf region of northern Australia. It specifically orients the discussion of the current predicament of ‘viral vulnerability’ in the wake of COVID‐19, relative to other pandemics, including the Hong Kong flu in 1969 and the Spanish flu decades earlier in 1919. This discussion highlights that culturally nuanced and prescribed responses to illness and threat of illness have a long history for Yanyuwa. Yanyuwa cultural repertoires have assisted in the process of making sense of massive change, in the form of past pandemics and the onset of sickness, the threat of illness with COVID‐19 and the attribution of ‘viral vulnerability’ to this remote Aboriginal community. The aim is to centralise Yanyuwa voices in this story, as an important step in growing understandings of Aboriginal knowledge of pandemics and culturally relevant and controlled health responses and strategies for communal well‐being.     

Place in legal geography: Agency and application in agriculture research

Systemic failure of our land management, legal, and regulatory institutions is revealed by the serious and adverse social and environmental impacts of land use practices in private agriculture, evident in severe land and water degradation, precipitous decline in biodiversity, and reduced resilience to natural hazards and climate change. The efficacy of the standard treatment of environmental law and regulation is often hampered by the cultural and legal priority of property rights. We take a different approach, using legal geography to refocus attention on the salience and agency of place and responses to degradation, such as conservation farming and regenerative agriculture, which are reforming dominant land management cultures and institutions from within. By recognising the role of place in leading geographically responsive land use decision-making and more sustainable, resilient, and productive agricultural practices, an alternative model of private land ownership may be possible, as well as greater environmental sustainability. For researchers, our approaches too must be sensitive and responsive to place agency and our methodologies must evolve to acknowledge the agency of place. Place agency in legal geography has great potential for application in reforming suboptimal industrial agricultural practices and legal models of property ownership, and also for revitalising our scholarship.     

An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene

Abstract: Over Antipode's 40 years our role as academics has dramatically changed. We have been pushed to adopt the stance of experimental researchers open to what can be learned from current events and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being. Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this essay explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. We place the hybrid research collective at the center of transformative change. Drawing on the sociology of science we frame research as a process of learning involving a collective of human and more‐than‐human actants—a process of co‐transformation that re/constitutes the world. From this vision of how things change, the essay begins to develop an “economic ethics for the Anthropocene”, documenting ethical practices of economy that involve the being‐in‐common of humans and the more‐than‐human world. We hope to stimulate academic interest in expanding and multiplying hybrid research collectives that participate in changing worlds.     

Republicans,Unionists and Jacobites: The 1st Marquess of Tweeddale and the Restoration of the British Parliament

Although John Hay, 1st marquess of Tweeddale, contributed significantly to both the ruthless overthrow of Charles I, and the establishment of the first British parliament in the 1650s, most of his political career was concerned with attempting to re-establish this parliament after it was dissolved at the restoration of Charles II. His first attempt ended in defeat at the hands of the king and the duke of Lauderdale in 1670, but following the overthrow of James VII and II in 1688, Tweeddale tried to persuade the prince of Orange to unite Scotland and England. The prince, however, showed much more interest in securing the crown of Scotland than uniting the two kingdoms. Tweeddale, as lord high commissioner to the Scottish parliament in 1695, responded by passing legislation designed to provoke the English parliament into accepting union. He was also engaged in a jacobite intrigue to restore King James. Tweeddale intended that the restored monarch would be little more than a puppet, who could be used to legitimise what was effectively a republican regime in all but name. By this means the restored parliament would avoid the unpopularity which brought down the first British parliament in 1660. Tweeddale's scheme came to nought, but the technique he employed to manipulate the English parliament, and exploit the jacobite threat, contributed to the restoration of the British parliament ten years after his death.     

Northern Ireland, British-Irish Relations and American Concerns, 1942-1956

This article considers the political impact of particular Irishcontroversies during the Second World War and the post-war period.It highlights the American dimension to these controversies,and examines what they reveal about different sets of inter-governmentalrelations, especially that of London and Belfast. The articleargues that the context of wartime, and the circumstances ofthe post-war era, should have led to more effective cooperationbetween the Westminster and Stormont governments to the endof improving the operation of devolution and ensuring the curtailmentof corrupt practices. The article also contends that there weresignificant tensions between different areas of successive Londongovernments which hampered the effective handling of Irish matters.     

Organising cyber security in Australia and beyond

The Internet is an interconnected network and cyber security requires collective action. How that action is organised has important implications for national security, including the defence against cyber attacks and malicious activities. This article explains the origins and institutionalisation of cyber security in Australia—particularly ‘civilian cyber security’. The authors trace the origin of Australia’s first computer emergency response team and explain how this organisational form spread from the USA. Through it, Australia helped enable international cooperation. Domestically, however, the authors argue that the Australian government has struggled with the delegation, orchestration and abdication of responsibility for civilian cyber security, underinvesting in civilian organisations while overrelying on military and intelligence agencies. The history of this organisational field provides valuable insight into how to improve national policy and operations for cyber security.     

Sheltering from domestic violence: Women’s experiences of punitive safety and unfreedom in Cambodian safe shelters

This paper explores the experiences of Cambodian domestic violence survivors who have fled their abusive partners to live in NGO-run safe shelters. Through in-depth interview research undertaken in 2016, we explore the stories of seven women whose experiences speak to tensions between having safety from violence and freedom to live as they choose. The pervasive impunity of the legal system means that Cambodian society operates as a safe space for perpetrators of domestic violence and spatially excludes survivors from it to guarantee their safety from injury and even murder. Just as violence against women has been described as a major area of ‘unfreedom’, we contend also that safe shelter provision in Cambodia, albeit essential, does not necessarily afford freedom from violence, but rather a punitive safety from it which can curtail women’s bodily integrity. Survivors are too often being excluded from decision-making processes in the shelter and treated as passive recipients of physical safety. Making the argument that safety and freedom are not coterminous, we contribute to recent feminist scholarship in geography and aligned disciplines focused on the significance and workings of safe space for marginalised groups. As such, the paper complicates singular viewpoints of safe spaces as enabling environments which can challenge oppressive forces both inside and outside of them.