Planet of the Australians: Indigenous athletes and Australian Football’s sports diplomacy

This article examines the Australian Football League’s (AFL) diplomatic efforts to bring about recognition and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous players, and to make a broader contribution to inter-communal relations. The AFL’s primary diplomacy has focused on classical racism, dealing with instances of on-field abuse of players by other players and with spectator education about racism and Indigenous culture in Australia. Despite successes in these areas, the AFL has notably failed to acknowledge structural, institutionalised modes of discrimination and exclusion, with the result that the sport remains deeply influenced by colonial thought and discourse concerning Indigenous Australians.     

Is Bigger Really Better? A Comparative Analysis of Municipal Mergers in Australian and Japanese Local Government

While structural reform by means of municipal mergers has been employed in many different countries, council consolidation has been especially marked in Australian and Japanese local government. This suggests that much can be learned by examining amalgamation through the analytical prism of comparative analysis. In this article, we investigate structural reform through municipal amalgamation in Australian and Japanese local government by examining the aims of amalgamation, the methods employed by public policy makers and the outcomes which were achieved. From this comparative analysis, we attempt to draw some broader lessons for local government policy making aimed at local government reform.     

The threat of autocracy diffusion in consolidated democracies? The case of China,Singapore and Australia

The majority of today’s authoritarian regimes have little hope of promoting autocracy beyond their own borders, let alone to consolidated democratic countries. However, China and Singapore are two prominent examples of non-democratic countries whose soft power arsenals have given them some global appeal beyond that enjoyed by most authoritarian regimes. But to what extent has China’s and Singapore’s power of example influenced consolidated democracies in terms that the latter wanting to replicate some political practices or even norms in these non-democratic regimes? In this article, we engage recent works to examine this question in relation to how Australians perceive the political example offered by China and Singapore. Focusing our analysis on several prominent polls conducted recently by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, we suggest that at present there is little evidence of a causal impact of the rise of authoritarian powerhouses such as China and Singapore on how Australians view democracy at home. Through these case studies, this article sheds some light on the theoretical as well as practical questions about the inherent impediments of authoritarian diffusion in consolidated democracies.     

Death by a Thousand Grants? The Challenge of Grant Funding Reliance for Local Government Councils in the Northern Territory of Australia

In July 2008, the local government sector in the Northern Territory of Australia underwent wide-sweeping reforms whereby 53 councils, most of which were located in remote Indigenous communities, were amalgamated into eight regional shires. The dominant justifications for these reforms focused on internal ‘deficit’ views about the community council sector, including lack of competent and ethical staff, managerial workforce instability, inefficient use of resources, and poor oversight as the primary causes of chronic underperformance and dysfunction. This paper identifies and discusses the under-scrutinised role of grants revenue dependency and volatility in the demise of remote small councils in the Northern Territory. We analyse financial data to demonstrate the extreme volatility in year-on-year grants funding. With their high dependency on grants revenue, such volatility and unpredictability resulted in councils being hamstrung in their ability to strategically plan and ensure stability in service delivery, infrastructure management and employment provision. We argue that these fiscal dynamics, fuelled by hierarchical intergovernmental relations, contributed significantly to dysfunction in the sector, as well as mutually reinforcing pre-existing structural and endogenous weaknesses. This argument runs against the common conceptualisation of the sector as requiring of externally imposed structural reform. We conclude by suggesting that there are factors additional to scale that need to be incorporated into analysis of the effects of amalgamation policies on remote councils.     

The Post-Tiananmen Human Rights Issue in China–Australia Relations

The Tiananmen events of June 1989 shattered the dream of a special relationship between China and Australia, making human rights one of the major issues to be addressed in their bilateral relations. Though differences emerged, they still needed manageable and constructive linkages because both of them were fully aware that confrontation could damage their common interests in economic prosperity and regional peace and stability. Consequently, the engagement in human rights was the mutual demand and pursuit between Beijing and Canberra. By means of engagement, Canberra expected that with the growth of China's economy and reform this moderate approach would bring about to China better conditions for more progress in human rights, though it might be at a slow speed. In the process of China's post-Tiananmen evolutionary human rights diplomacy changes, Australia was one of the countries to be won over by China in facilitating its policy implementation. Admittedly, China's bilateral dialogue approach and technical cooperation with Australia and some other Western countries contributed to the successive failure of the American attempt to take multilateral actions to pass an anti-China resolution in the UN Human Rights Commission (replaced by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2006). Meanwhile, China had to take such steps as responding to concerns on rights issues raised by its dialogue partners and accepting and implementing UN human rights instruments to maintain the engagement approach. Resultantly, the process of China's engagement with Australia and other Western states in human rights is also a process of its learning how to deal with Western pressure constructively and how to improve human rights at home.     

Confronting the Reality

SUMMARY

The most recent UNAIDS report (December 2003) estimates that approximately 5 million persons became infected with the HIV virus globally in 2003 alone, while 3 million persons died as a result of HIV/AIDS. What do these staggering numbers mean for the Caribbean population? Is the impact of HIV/AIDS the same among Caribbean immigrants in the United States as among the Caribbean population in the countries of origin? If so, what are the factors that promote the spread of HIV/AIDS among this population regardless of their geographic location? Finally, what can be done to reverse the growing infection rate that has made the Caribbean the second largest population to suffer from HIV/AIDS globally? In this paper the authors explore sociocultural, attitudinal and gender-specific factors that place the Caribbean population at risk of the ongoing spread of HIV/AIDS. The authors make recommendations for a community involvement response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic that targets the individual, family and community to address the problem of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean population. A community involvement model with its potential to reduce the negative impact of socio-structural factors, and attitudes towards victims of HIV/AIDS is recommended as a meaningful response to HIV/AIDS among the Caribbean population.