From ‘crime’ to social harm?

Debates around the relationships between criminology and social harm are long-standing. This article sets out some of the key features of current debates between, on the one hand, those who would retain a commitment to ‘crime’ and criminology and those, on the other hand who would abandon criminology for a social harm perspective. To this end, the article begins by highlighting several criticisms of criminology, criticisms raised in particular by a diverse group of critical criminologists over the past 30 to 40 years. While these are hardly new, the rehearsal of these is an important starting point for a discussion of the potential of the development of an alternative discipline. The paper then proposes a number of reasons why a disciplinary approach organised around a notion of social harm may prove to be more productive than has criminology hitherto: that is, may have the potential for greater theoretical coherence and imagination, and for more political progress.     

Sir Henry Bland and the Fraser Government's Administrative Review Committee: Another Chapter in the Statutory Authority Wars?

The release of the 1976 Commonwealth cabinet records on 1 January 2007 provided the opportunity to review the work of the Administrative Review Committee (ARC) appointed by the Fraser government and headed by Sir Henry Bland and so to open up a hitherto little appreciated chapter in Australian administrative history. At first glance, it appeared that Bland's ARC had been strongly opposed to widespread use of statutory authorities, for so long a regular part of Australia's machinery of government, thus providing an interesting point of comparison with the Uhrig inquiry of 2003-04, which attracted much notice for its antipathy towards statutorily independent agencies. Given the unusual methodology of the ARC, it was also likely that an account of its work would shed further light on public inquiries generally, perhaps assisting in development of a typology of such inquiries.