AIDS Audit – HIV and Human Rights: An Australian Pilot

This article explores the Australian pilot of a human rights audit using ten indicators in the specific area of HIV/AIDS. The new methodology has three main roles: a monitoring device to measure human rights protection in a jurisdiction's legal system against international standards; an intervention to raise local dialogue and consciousness of rights-based legislation; and an advocacy tool to stimulate law reform. It uses a tripartite process balancing independent experts, government, and community representatives. This approach attempts to overcome some of the democratic deficits identified by Power's hypothesis on the explosion of regulatory audits (1997).     

Political Science: A Look at the Discipline from a Postgraduate Perspective

Research has become increasingly important within social science since the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The RAE has served to simultaneously focus the attention of academic institutions upon research output and emphasise the obvious penalties of poor performance in this area in terms of potentially lower academic status, lower income and lower student numbers. Academic institutions have, therefore, begun to pay an increasing amount of attention to postgraduate research and the needs of postgraduates. This article questions the extent to which institutions are actually meeting these needs and reviews the extent to which institutions reap the potential benefits that employment of postgraduates can bring.     

Ways of Knowing and Inclusive Management Practices

The authors engage structural and agentic perspectives to examine opportunities for deliberation and the purposeful role of managers in creating those opportunities. Drawing on actor-network theory as a way of understanding the process of structuring knowledge, this essay focuses on the continuous enactment and reenactment of networks of human and nonhuman actants and the associations that connect them. This thinking is applied to policy issues, which the authors propose should be understood as ways of knowing. The fluidity of such ways of knowing provides opportunities for public managers to use the inclusive practices associated with boundary experiences, boundary objects, and boundary organizations to facilitate deliberation.     

Assumptions within Policy: A Case Study of Information Communications and Technology Policy

The deeply embedded nature of dominant assumptions creates an accepted language and way of thinking about ICT, leaving little space for alternative perspectives and ideologies. Policy directions link information technology, the information economy, innovation, competition and global markets. Innovation and information and communications technology constructs a particular application of innovation and directs funding accordingly. Given that policy is about how we categorise, about naming and naming shapes action, the question is what lenses do policy makers use to make choices in their synthesis of social, political and economic life? Using the Australian Information Communications and Technology (ICT) policy as a case study, this article will argue that policy reflects the economic, social and political ideologies of the decision makers. Despite opportunities for input into policy multiple perspectives are limited. Specifically the article looks at claims around consultation, the assumption that the information economy will benefit all Australians, the development of framework conditions for the information economy and the role of government.