Regulating non‐government schools: Explaining success and failure

The challenge faced by governments in the regulation of powerful private actors has allegedly intensified in recent years. This study explores the means at the disposal of governments, and their effectiveness, with respect to the regulation of private actors that demonstrate considerable independence and political efficacy. It is argued that a modified ‘Contextual Interaction Theory’ (CIT), which focuses on the interaction between generic policy instruments (carrots, sticks, and sermons) and target group attributes (motivation, information, and power), and is augmented by a consideration of a separate institutional dimension, offers a useful analytical framework for understanding both the challenge faced by governments and the options for dealing with it. This framework is applied to a study of the introduction of ‘new accountability’ to Australian and Israeli non‐government schools. The use of the standard CIT lenses helps explain Australian success and Israeli government failure in the introduction of new accountability. Australian success is attributable to a judicious mix of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ instruments that favorably impacted target group information and motivation. In Israel, in contrast, policy instrument mixes failed to alter the main target group's oppositional stance. Institutional engineering, however, could provide a promising way for Israeli policymakers to enhance policy instrument effectiveness, by influencing target group power and motivation.     

澳大利亚政府绩效评价实践的最新进展

澳大利亚政府绩效评价工作开展较早,发展至今积累了大量的有益经验。现行的评价体系结构宏大,内涵丰富,真正有效地促进了澳大利亚政府公共服务的质量提升。本文介绍了由澳大利亚公共服务委员会以及生产力委员会主导的政府绩效评价模式,总结其特点并对我国政府绩效评价的发展提出了建议。     

Pauline Hanson and the Rise and Fall of the Radical Right in Australia

Abstract

In this paper Deutchman examines the rise and fall of the radical right in the late 1990s in Australia. In particular, she focuses on the rise and fall of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party. In 1996 an obscure backbencher named Pauline Hanson was elected to the federal parliament. From the moment she made her first speech in September of that year she was rarely off the nation's front pages. By April 1997 she started her own political party, One Nation. By July 1998 her party was able to win an astonishing 23 per cent of the vote in the Queensland state election. And by October 1998 she lost her own seat in Parliament and saw her party's fortunes decline. Deutchman examines various theories which have attempted to explain the rise of radical-right parties in Europe and the United States in order to understand the Australian case. Notably, she argues that the convergence of the two major parties, the Coalition and the Australian Labor Party, provides the setting in which the emergence of a radical-right party becomes more likely. Such a party often emerges when the two major parties are centre-right ones, as is the case in Australia. In most countries research has shown that it is difficult for a radical-right party to do well nationally. Indeed, this has been true in Australia. Despite the fact that One Nation has lost much of its electoral support, Deutchman argues that it is premature to write off the radical right in Australia.     

Comparative Climate Change Policy and Federalism: An Overview

This commentary provides an overview of the four papers in this issue of Review of Policy Research on the politics of climate change. The papers all address in one way or another aspects of how federal‐type systems are dealing with the collective action and multilevel governance issues of climate change policy. The comparative study of federal systems provides insight into how domestic authority is so often overlapping and divided when dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Federal arrangements offer a rich array of norms, institutions, and practices for tackling these problems. Federal systems grapple continuously with the kinds of issues that are the most intractable in the climate change case, such as overcoming interregional differences of interests and values. A common federal feature is competition among subnational governments and between them and national or federated governments over climate change policy, which has been especially significant in the United States and in Canada in the relative absence of national action––although soberingly, the whole is as yet nowhere near as great as the sum of the parts. More significant, but rarer is the achievement of tighter coordination in federal systems achieved through intergovernmental co‐decision, as seen in the European Community and Australia. This has been accomplished in large part due to a consensus among all intergovernmental parties on the nature of the problem and congruence with the existing international regime, characteristics missing in the North American context.     

Ten key developments in modern policing: an Australian perspective

In this paper we endeavour to isolate the top ten innovations and developments that have occurred in policing in the last thirty years. We consider that each of them brought about a new mindset, pattern or trend into contemporary police practice. We have focused our attention on the last thirty years because it is during this time that we have both maintained a keen academic interest in the field. While we have focused our attention on the way in which each has affected Australian policing, we are cognisant of the fact that many of them had their roots in other settings long before Australian policy-makers adopted or adapted them.     

The global reach of the principle of subsidiarity: the case of Australia

ABSTRACT

The diffusion of the principle of subsidiarity across countries and regions has taken on a variety of forms. In the case of the EU and Australia the observed variation is most striking. The detailed comparison of the governance arrangements in a quasi-federal system with those of a fully established federation reveals a continuing divergence in the actual recognition of subsidiarity concerns.     

澳大利亚转移支付简介及其对我国的启示

通过协调区域经济发展,为全国统一市场的最终形成扫除障碍,是“十一五”规划要重点突破的领域。作为我国财政资金分配和财政平衡制度的转移支付还存在一些不完善的地方,离公共财政的要求尚有一定距离。学习和借鉴国外发达国家经验,调整财政资源在我国纵向和横向的不均衡,逐步实现公共服务支出基本均等化,事关国家的长治久安、民族团结和社会稳定。     

The Transformation of Labor Party Immigration Policy, 1901–1945

ABSTRACT

The Commonwealth Labor government’s introduction of a program of mass immigration after the Second World War was a pivotal moment in the nation’s history. The program itself and the experiences of those who settled in Australia have been studied closely by historians and social scientists. Less attention has been given to the fact that the postwar policy represented a transformation of Labor’s traditional attitude to immigration. Since its foundation in the 1890s, the Australian Labor Party had been suspicious of immigration and opposed to programs of assisted immigration on the basis that migrant labour threatened the wages and conditions of Australian workers. This article traces Labor’s attitudes to migration before the Second World War and shows how economic and security exigencies compelled the party to repudiate its decades-long opposition to assisted immigration. The article suggests that the reason that the postwar immigration program does not receive greater prominence in histories of the Labor Party is because the policy and its chief architect, Arthur Calwell, are diminished by their association with the White Australia policy.     

“Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” I Do: Postwar Australian Wine,Gendered Culture and Class

During an era of expanding social inclusion in the 1960s and 1970s, Australians increasingly drank more wine than at any previous time in colonial or national history. These wines were made in new styles and consumed in accordance with new habits across gender and class. The morphology of one of Australia’s most popular “introduction wines” of this period, Lindeman’s Ben Ean Moselle, reveals the emergence of new elements of national character. From being advertised to women in the late 1960s as “just right”, Ben Ean’s cultural messaging in the 1970s flirted with general appeal to men and women of the new middle class: “anywhere, anytime”. Then, by the mid-1980s, the ascendancy of this light, semi-sweet table wine was halted by the emergence of an elitism in which new professionals favoured consumer products of provenanced distinction. The arc of Ben Ean’s rise and fall symbolises an informalisation and subsequent reformalisation of values, conventions and identities during a time of social and cultural flux.