The New South Wales doctors' dispute 1984–85: An interpretation

The NSW doctors’ dispute 1984–85 has had a lasting effect on the Australian health care system. Militant surgeons were effective in securing some modifications to regulations and administrative arrangements governing the role and remuneration of certain groups of doctors in NSW public hospitals and some changes to the federal government's Medicare scheme.

This paper examines the causes, actors, issues and outcome of the dispute. The key to understanding the dispute is a knowledge of both the specific issues debated by militant doctors and the federal and NSW Labor governments and the broader historical forces that have shaped the politics of national health insurance throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to media reports, the outcome of the dispute is interpreted as a compromise rather than a victory for the doctors. It is further argued that a theoretical generalisation formulated by two American political scientists, Marmor and Thomas, about disputes between doctors and governments over payment methods is only partially useful in explaining the outcome.

Two prominent and well‐documented historical themes from the politics of national health insurance in Australia — namely, the resistance of sections of the medical profession to any contraction of the private market for medicine and the fragmentation of the organised medical profession during periods of disputation with governments at the state and federal level — are discussed. These themes, and some generalisations about the capacity of the medical profession to influence public policy outcomes, are illuminated by the study.     

THE PROVENANCE OF DONKEY MILLS FROM ROMAN BRITAIN

Pompeiian-style (hourglass) grain mills are common at many Roman sites within the circum-Mediterranean countries. Three examples are known from Corfe Mullen, London and Hamworthy in southern Britain. Petrographic examination, chemical and microprobe analyses indicate that the Corfe Mullen millstone and the London donkey mill were imported from central France into southern Britain. The Hamworthy mill should be designated a ‘flat donkey mill’, and represents a recent (post-Roman) import from a volcanic source in Sardinia. There is no evidence of importation of Roman donkey mills from Germany or for transportation of such mills (or stylistic derivatives) north of London.     

NETWORK EQUILIBRIUM MODELS OF URBAN LOCATION AND TRAVEL CHOICES: A RETROSPECTIVE SURVEY*

ABSTRACT The origins and development of the network equilibrium problem are traced and interrelated. Two principal formulations are considered the network equilibrium problem with variable travel demand, and the combined model of trip distribution and traffic assignment. The relation of these models to subsequent developments concerning mode choice, residential location, estimation of origin-destination tables from link flows and stochastic route choice are then reviewed.     

A FIJIAN PEASANTRY: GALALA AND VILLAGERS

Village societies in rural Fiji have often been studied in terms of a dichotomy between traditional village communalism and independent galala individualism. This was especially so in the 1960s, at a time when government efforts to promote individualist Fijian agriculture led to the creation of a number of resettlement schemes based on the peasant model. Social scientists hailed the galala movement as a fundamental and progressive process of change in Fijian society. However, recent evidence and the demise of regulations which institutionalised galala point to the present lack of distinction between galala and villagers. Indeed, there is considerable confusion within some villages over how galala should be defined and it seems to be much more a matter of spatial location of residence than any attitudinal or economic break with communalism.     

Incorporating the effects of spatial structure in discrete choice models of migration

Discrete-choice theory and logit models are evaluated for their usefulness in analyzing migration patterns in a zonal system. The authors "argue that spatial effects and more specifically the relative location of zones are not taken into account in such analyses. We, therefore, introduce a measure of spatial structure and advocate its usage as a predictor of migration in such models. In an example of intrametropolitan migration in Toronto [Canada], we demonstrate that this variable is not only significant but also it improves the performance of all the other variables with the greatest impact on the distance between zones. In addition, inclusion of this variable improves the overall performance of the model in terms of residuals."