Immigration and Criminality: Australia's Post‐War Inquiries

The relationship between immigration and crime rates has long been a topic of robust debate in criminology and sociology, especially for scholars of the United States. Researchers in those fields have highlighted divergent factors to explain high arrest rates including the presence of ethnic gangs, media reporting, racial profiling, over‐policing of immigrant communities, and wider issues of social dislocation brought about by migration. By contrast, historians have given little consideration to the topic. This lack of historical investigation is particularly curious in studies of Australia's post‐war immigration given the political importance of the issue at the time. Immigration and criminality — or more precisely, whether immigrants committed more crime or worse crimes than the Australian‐born population — became a prominent topic of media coverage and political interest in the early 1950s. In fact, the question of migrants’ criminality was so important that it was the subject of the first research inquiries ever ordered by the Department of Immigration. Our article examines this research, explaining the impetus for the inquiries, their findings, and their historical significance. We conclude by outlining how this topic can illuminate new areas of inquiry in immigration history.     

The Marble Cake: Introducing Federalism to the Government Growth Equation

A great deal of A great deal of literature has examined thefactors that explain government growth in the United States.Analyses have typically been conducted either nationally orby states, but virtually no systematic attention has been givento the role federalism plays in shaping patterns of growth acrossdifferent orders of government. In this research note, we useGranger causality methods to assess the degree to which governmentgrowth is an interactive process across local, state, and nationalgovernments. Our findings indicate that state governments arean important force in this process; hence, future models ofgovernment growth need to incorporate federalism explicitly.     

The Role,Scope and Scale of Local Government in New Zealand: Its Prospective Future

This article contributes to the current debate as to the role, scope and scale of local government in New Zealand. In 2008, the Nationals Local Government Minister announced his intention to undertake a fundamental review of local government in NZ. This review finally took shape in mid 2011 with the publication of the consultation document ‘Smarter Government, Stronger Communities: towards better local governance and public services’ ( Hide 2011 ). This article adds to the debate by identifying four key themes within the NZ local government system, namely: the legislative framework; managerial capabilities; calibre of elected members and finally democratic deficit and community disengagement. Whilst the first two themes are undoubted strengths, the latter two are equally weaknesses in the local governance system of NZ. Hence the article makes a number of recommendations, seeking to exploit the strengths and to correct the weaknesses in order to create a robust and credible local governance system for NZ.     

Deterring gun crime materially using forensic coatings

Surface coatings that can help deter and solve gun crime are described. These nanoengineered coatings have been applied and evaluated on brass cartridge cases, where they increase associative forensic evidence through nanotag donation to the handler and the retention of handler's DNA. In future we expect this approach to be used for other surfaces and conditions.