Media coverage of the Queensland drought rorts saga: Learning Fitzgerald lessons?

Many observers saw die performance of Queensland's main media group in pursuing the National Party government in 1989 over allegations of drought‐aid rorts, as an indication that the compliant and manipulated media identified by corruption commissioner, Tony Fitzgerald, QC, had shown new teeth in their watchdog role. But a close examination of die coverage shows that the way the media operate has changed little, and that there needs to be continuing concern about the effectiveness of a media system in which a parochial orientation leads not to closer scrutiny of decision‐making but to closer cooperation with decision‐makers as news sources.     

SPATIAL EQUILIBRIUM WITH FOOTLOOSE FIRMS*

ABSTRACT. We determine the location equilibria in a duopoly model under a novel solution concept. Typically, spatial equilibrium is described as either a simultaneous price and location game, or else as a two-stage location-then-price game. We introduce a new alternative, a two-stage price-then-location game. It is well known that no (pure strategy) equilibrium usually exists under the two standard solution concepts when products are homogeneous. We show this is also true for the new concept. We then provide numerical results for a specific functional form (the logit model) which introduces product heterogeneity into the standard framework, restoring equilibrium when the degree of substitutability between products is not too small.     

Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons

Emerging debates on the contemporary reconfigurations of work question previous understandings of the relationships among and between waged, unwaged, and reproductive labour, situated processes of value formation and/or enclosure, and the constitution and limits of contemporary capitalism. Taking Cindi Katz's notion of countertopographies and Gillian Hart's notion of relational comparison as inspirations, this Symposium draws attention to new and existing conceptual frames and modes of analysis to situate contemporary permutations of work within the shifting dynamics of uneven development in specific state, local, and institutional contexts. This Introduction summarises the interrelated and overlapping contributions that papers in this Symposium offer methodologically, analytically, and politically. The open-ended aspiration that emerges from these contributions is that close attention to heterogeneous formations of work outside the wage might help to multiply forms of vigilance and critical praxis necessary to resist the co-optation and enclosure of people's creative energies, and move toward realising the latent liberatory potentials that several of the contributions suggest.     

Why Does the Cook Islands Still Need Overseas Aid?

The Cook Islands Government spends more than 40 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Its tax revenue is capped at 25 per cent of GDP under a 1998 austerity package agreed with its creditors New Zealand, Nauru and the Asian Development Bank. Non-tax revenue is 5 per cent of GDP, and external aid fills the resulting gap. This recently renewed reliance on aid contrasts sharply with the strong performance of the economy’s private sector, driven by a booming tourism industry, which has pushed the balance of payments into a huge surplus and raises important questions about the allocation of the gains from growth.     

A mother's gift? Astrology and the pyxis of al-Mughīra

ABSTRACT

This article re-examines the most celebrated, and most controversial, of the Cordoban ivories, the al-Mughīra pyxis, from a perspective of gender and kinship relations within the court hierarchy. It proposes an alternative patron for this object, namely al-Mughīra's mother al-Mushtaq, a consort of the Cordoban Umayyad caliph ?Abd al-Rahmān III (r. 929–61) in the latter years of his life, and a patron of architecture. The article suggests astronomical and astrological possibilities for interpreting the pyxis’ unusual iconography, which arise from considering al-Mushtaq as a potential patron of the al-Mughīra pyxis. Key to the argument is the notion that women in the Cordoban court were ‘makers’ of art and architecture, in that they could and did exercise authority through artistic patronage.