The Protection of Confidentiality in Australian Family Law

This paper identifies and discusses the legislative provisions which protect confidentiality in family law proceedings in Australia. The purpose of discussing these protections is two‐fold: firstly, to identify the scope and operation of these protections for Australian legal practitioners; secondly, to allow comparison of Australian protections to those offered in other jurisdictions. This paper will consider duties of confidentiality and evidential privileges in the context of settlement negotiation, mediation, arbitration, lawyer‐client relationships and medical, counselling and other therapeutic relationships. The rationale for the protection of confidentiality in some of these relationships and circumstances, but not in others, will also be considered in an attempt to understand why it is so.     

Future of South Korea–Japan Relations: Decoupling or Liberal Discourse

South Korea–Japan relations are at their lowest point in decades, as colonial era disputes flare once again. Most pundits argue that the South Korean public is strongly united against Japan. We argue that South Korean elites are sharply divided over how to manage the crisis; this division is starting to impact how South Koreans understand colonial era narratives; and, long-term, bilateral relations depend on how these growing divisions play out. Despite state censorship, a rising counter-narrative in South Korea challenges the dominant, Manichaean, anti-Japanese one. For the first time, Korea and Japan have a realistic chance of reconciling based on liberal public discourse and a nuanced, empirically based understanding of history.     

Workplace Monitoring and the Right to Private Life at Work

In Barbulescu v Romania, the European Court of Human Rights clarified the application of the Article 8 right to private life in the workplace, and the extent of the state's positive obligations to protect the right against workplace monitoring. The decision establishes that there is an irreducible core to the right to private life at work that does not depend on an employee's reasonable expectations of privacy, and sets out clear principles for striking a fair balance between Article 8 and the employer's interests in the context of workplace monitoring. This article considers the nature of states’ positive obligation to protect human rights at work, the scope of the right to private life, and the impact of the decision on domestic law of unfair dismissal.     

Charlottesville Paradox: The ‘Liberalizing’ Alt-Right, ‘Authoritarian’ Left,and Politics of Dialogue

In the aftermath of the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy, the prevailing narrative is a Manichean division between ‘white supremacists’ and ‘anti-racists’. We suggest a more complicated, nuanced reality. While the so-called ‘Alt-Right’ includes those pursuing an atavistic political end of racial and ethnic separation, it is also characterised by pluralism and a strategy of nonviolent dialogue and social change, features associated with classic liberalism. The ‘Left,’ consistent with its historic mission, opposes the Alt-Right’s racial/ethnic prejudice; but, a highly visible movement goes farther, embracing an authoritarianism that would forcibly exclude these voices from the public sphere. This authoritarian element has influenced institutions historically committed to free expression and dialogue, notably universities and the ACLU. We discuss these paradoxes by analysing the discourse and actions of each movement, drawing from our study of hundreds of posts and articles on Alt-Right websites and our online exchanges on a leading site (AltRight.com). We consider related news reports and scholarly research, concluding with the case for dialogue.     

Economic development and democracy revisited: Why dependency theory is not yet dead

It is generally accepted that there is a relationship between economic development and democracy which can be demonstrated by quantitative empirical evidence. The difficulties of validating the empirical claims derive not so much from the measures of economic development as from the measures of democracy itself. Our inquiry deepens the investigation of the relationship by 'unpacking' the dependent variable into separate measures of eight core values of liberal democratic government for 40 countries over the period 1970-1998. Our model assumes that the quality of liberal democratic government is not one-dimensional but can be measured across this range of values, so creating 'performance profiles' and demonstrating the likely trade-offs across distinct democratic values. The results of the analysis confirm that economic development has positive effects on democratic performance, but these effects vary across diverse aspects of performance and also across regions.     

The Learning Orientation of Primary Health Care Teams in the English National Health Service: Is This a Myth That Should Be Perpetuated?

A qualitative study of primary health care teams in the UK provides insight into their co-ordination or learning-orientation and how this affects member commitment, conceptions of ‘core’ and periphery, group identification and willingness to integrate roles. Even if the ideal of a learning-oriented primary health care team is viewed as a myth, it can still perform useful functions despite an apparent withdrawal of its official authorization by the Cameron-led government. The perpetuation of this myth maintains a tension between reality and potentiality in the hopes that inspire its pursuit as an ideal of team formation.     

Book notes

Jeffrey Mourssaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy: When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Val Plumwood: Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993.

Karen J. Warren, ed.: Ecological Feminism. London: Routledge, 1994.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson: A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Wendy Harcourt, editor: Feminist Perspectives on Sustainable Development. New Jersey: Zed Books Limited and the Society for International Development, 1994.