Torres Strait Governance Structures and the Centenary of Australian Federation: A Missed Opportunity?

In his 1993 Boyer lecture, Getano Lui Jnr called for a change in the status of Torres Strait governance structures within the Australian federation, nominating the centenary of Federation on 1 January 2001 as a possible time for change. In 1996, the Commonwealth Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs initiated a parliamentary committee inquiry into greater autonomy for the people of the Torres Strait, which reported favourably in 1997. This report was not, however, greeted all that favourably by Torres Strait Islanders and it now seems unlikely that any significantly new governance structures for Torres Strait will be in place by the centenary of Federation. This paper attempts to explain why.     

Being a Good Senior Manager in Indigenous Community Governance: Working with Public Purpose and Private Benefit

This article seeks to understand the role of being a senior manager in Indigenous community governance, particularly though not exclusively in remote Aboriginal communities. It argues against the tendency of would‐be reformers of Indigenous community governance to focus on the competence and ethical qualities of those who occupy these roles and asks instead how can isolated managerialism in Indigenous community governance be overcome? The article begins with an overview of Ralph Folds' analysis of relations between Pintupi settlements and the larger Australian polity. While taking much from Folds' analysis, the article argues that ultimately he relies too heavily on the idea of antithetical worldviews across the settlement interface, on a problematic distinction between the official and private uses of publicly allocated resources and on too idealist a view of the Australian state. The article argues that the state's allocation of public resources inevitably involves a flow of private benefits and that public purposes and private benefits are not different phenomena, but rather different perspectives on state action. In contrast to Folds' idealism about the state, the article outlines a more thoroughly realist or materialist analysis of being a good senior manager in Indigenous community governance. In its concluding section, the article makes some suggestions for overcoming isolated managerialism in Indigenous community governance oganisations.     

Discount Latin American(ist) Intellectuals

Any settling of scores about the state and role of intellectuals in the west has to factor in the function of Latin American writers and the subset of pseudo-intellectuals called “Latin Americanists” of the second half of the twentieth century. The score is not even, since the university-bound misrepresent the actual development of intellectual thought in the southern hemisphere. The ideas and ubiquity of Mario Vargas Llosa are a necessary point of departure to calibrate properly the real importance of those views.

Coombs’ Bastard Child: The Troubled Life of CDEP

In the mid 1970s HC Coombs was a major promoter of the idea behind the CDEP scheme: that rather than pay lots of Aboriginal people in remote areas unemployment benefits it would be more constructive for them to be employed part‐time by local Indigenous organisations to undertake socially useful tasks. From this simple idea was born one of the most significant and, in time, one of the largest Indigenous‐specific programs Australia has seen, the Community Development Employment Projects scheme. The birth was not easy and neither has been the subsequent life of what I have called, with great licence, Coombs’ bastard child.     

The Electoral Consequences of Roll Call Voting: Health Care and the 2018 Election

Political Behavior - For years, Republicans in Congress promised to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. The results of the 2016 elections put them in position to take action...     

Waller R. Newell: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Tyrants: A History of Power,Injustice, and Terror</Emphasis>

Newell offers a typology of tyrants: the profit-and-pleasure-seeking “garden variety”; the would-be “reformers”; and the genocidal “millenarians.” Ranging widely across the globe and through the centuries, he provides a link between political philosophy and tyrannical practice that is often missing in the scholarly literature.