Failing to live up to the promise: the politics of equal pay in ‘new’ workplace and industrial relations institutions

Workplace and industrial relations regulations are key sites for policy intervention to address Australia's gender pay gap, which, at 15.3 per cent, is almost as large as it was in 1997. In both the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) and the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 (Cth) the goal of equal pay has a more central place than it did in predecessor legislation. In particular, the Fair Work Act has the potential to deliver more gender-equitable wage structures through addressing systemic gender-based undervaluation at the industry level. Adopting a feminist institutional approach this article examines equal pay policy in the operations of workplace and industrial relations regulation to ask why, despite some recent successes, this potential appears unlikely to be realised.     

Bringing lessons from crisis management into the realm of wicked problems

Despite long-term research agendas around how to better understand and address wicked problems, they remain ‘wicked’ while crises generally come to an end. The objective of this paper is to assess whether governments seeking to address wicked problems can learn lessons from the insights of crisis management. While we are careful to avoid stretching the lessons of crisis management too far, we argue that there is untapped potential in establishing the broader applicability of crisis research to wicked problems. In doing so, we identify traditional roadblocks to addressing wicked issues and suggest that they are much less discernible in many crisis conditions. We then illustrate via a case study of the whole-of-government response to the 2011 Queensland Floods in Australia. The case has broader relevance beyond Australia in identifying how the challenges of crisis management can help us find better ways of addressing seemingly intractable wicked policy problems, particularly through strategic crisis framing.     

'Safe space' as counter‐space: women, environmental illness and 'corporeal chaos'

Women constitute a disproportionate 80 percent of people diagnosed with environmental illness (EI), a contentious condition in which patients react adversely to everyday chemicals in the environment at levels politically conceived to be 'safe'. Whilst the diverse range of somatic symptoms constitutes a biomedical anomaly, in this paper I present an alternative means of conceiving environmentally ill bodies. Women (and environmental health practitioners at the Environmental Health Centre, Nova Scotia) have begun to view their bodies as complex systems that have been nudged into a state of 'corporeal chaos', in which minute quantities of chemicals trigger disproportionate somatic symptoms. This chaos extends into 'corporeal space'[ Moss and Dyck (1999a) ] as the diagnosis of environmental illness is experienced simultaneously through both material and discursive bodies. This diagnosis also carries with it a means to mitigate corporeal chaos through a series of body‐ and environment‐based modifications that replace risky bodies with 'safe space'. As a discursive construct, safe space is associated with an absence of chemicals, and in order to mitigate chaos, should ideally be stable, predictable, controllable and communicative. I finalise this paper with some examples of body modifications and illustrate how safe space materialises in the home environment .     

Policy Fiascos,Blame Management and AWB Limited: The Howard Government's Escape from the Iraq Wheat Scandal

In 1999, the Australian government privatised the statutory Australian Wheat Board and created AWB Limited, transferring the Board's assets and its export monopoly to a grower-controlled company. In 2000, allegations surfaced that AWB Limited had made payments to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime in order to secure lucrative wheat exports worth $500 million per annum. Such actions violated the terms of the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme and became one of the biggest corporate scandals in Australian history. It also placed considerable pressure on senior ministers in John Howard's coalition government who were vulnerable on a number of issues, including the existence of numerous warning signs and the extent of ministerial awareness. The purpose of this article is to outline and examine the federal government's role in managing the ensuing blame game. It utilises literature on policy fiascos and blame management to create a conceptual framework that is then applied to the unfolding dynamics of the AWB Limited case. It examines issues such as the roles played by the Cole Inquiry and the political language of ministers in steering blame away from ministers and towards AWB Limited and the UN.