AT ARM'S LENGTH WITH DIRTY HANDS: TAXING THE AUSTRALIAN PUNTER

Abstract: Taxes on betting are a major source of revenue for Australian state governments. Specific taxes on the racing industry date from 1915. However, the revenue potential has only been tapped in all the states since the legalisation in the past 30 years of off-course betting through the state-run totalisator (TAB). The introduction of the TAB followed a long period when various states adopted different policies towards off-course betting, ranging from legalisation of bookmakers' betting shops to attempts at complete suppression. In tracing the history of these policies, the focus is on "implementation failure", or the many administrative pitfalls and obstacles that were experienced. These include insurmountable tax evasion by bookmakers, regulatory capture of betting boards by bookmakers and corruption of the law enforcement agencies. State governments also had to accommodate a range of conflicting interests, including the interests of the racing industry itself and the demands of the anti-gambling lobby. The TAB is shown to be a happy and convenient resolution of most, but not all, of these administrative and political dilemmas.     

The use of phosphate buffered saline for the recovery of cells and spermatozoa from swabs.

In the forensic science laboratory, the recovery of spermatozoa from vaginal swabs, or vaginal cells from penile swabs, can help determine if sexual intercourse may have taken place. There are several methods used to recover spermatozoa and cells from the swabs before visualisation on a microscope slide and most of these methods use water. Phosphate buffered saline (PBS) is a non-toxic solution used in many biological laboratories. Unlike water, PBS prevents cells rupturing or shrivelling up due to osmosis. This study demonstrates that PBS can be used for the extraction of spermatozoa and cells from swabs and that PBS does not affect subsequent DNA profiling.     

Drivers of natural resource-based political conflict

Policy Sciences - Why are some natural resource-based political conflicts so controversial, acrimonious and intractable? What factors drive these conflicts? And what turns the common political...     

Prolonged Armed Conflict and Diminished Deference to the Military: Lessons from Israel

We examine whether the level of deference shown by the Israeli Supreme Court to military decisions has changed over time by empirically analyzing the entire body of Supreme Court decisions in petitions against the military commander between 1990 and 2005. Setting forth a number of different factors that might generally affect the degree of deference to state agencies, we hypothesized that there would be a decrease in deference in the relationship between the Court and the military commander during the examined period. Our findings show that deference to the military commander has indeed diminished significantly. We argue that this is best explained by the continuation of the armed conflict (and its aftermath, namely, the routinization and increase in the number of petitions by the civilian population) and also—to some extent—by the rise of a substantive rule-of-law legal consciousness, central to which is the importance of human rights.