Special report on labor and employment. Provider obligations under the Drug-Free Workplace Act

In view of the sanctions that may be taken by government agencies against employers, all providers should take their obligations under the Act seriously. The first step for each provider is to determine if it is subject to the Act or to any analogous state statutes. If so, the provider should take steps, if it has not already done so, to comply with the Act or applicable state legislation. While the Act has been criticized as a matter of social policy for not going further to prevent substance abuse in the workplace--by, for example, mandating drug testing or requiring sanctions against employees without the prerequisite of a criminal conviction--there is no question that the penalties it authorizes against employers do go far enough to warrant careful compliance with the Act's provisions.     

Bad Feelings

While the importance of negativity and negative affects to queer history and theory has been the subject of much recent critical discussion, bad feelings are equally prevalent in contemporary feminist theory. The aim of this article is not to provide a summary overview of a recent negative turn in feminist theory, however, nor to identify the early twenty-first century socio-political causes of this welling up of bad feeling. Rather, its purpose is to consider the way the increasing centrality of studies of affect to feminist histories and politics allows us to reconceptualise these as ‘affective genealogies'. The article examines this by focusing on three representative texts, which it takes as representative of three key moments in the recent affective genealogy of feminism: Rosi Braidotti's Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002); Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness (2010); and Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011).     

Will the National Disability Insurance Scheme Improve the Lives of those Most in Need? Effective Service Delivery for People with Acquired Brain Injury and other Disabilities in Remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities

The aims of National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) are to provide long‐term, person‐centred care and support to all Australians with a significant and ongoing disability, including individuals with an acquired brain injury (ABI). The scheme has significant potential to provide equitable opportunity of access to health and disability services. Historically, however, service provision in remote and outer regional areas of Australia lags behind more densely populated centres. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders living with disability are already significantly marginalised. Further to this, people with an ABI are very often misunderstood and overlooked by disability services, health professionals and governments, and frequently fall victim to the criminal justice system. This paper provides an overview of the state of ABI disability for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in remote and outer regional settings, and the present sets of barriers they face to obtaining quality care and effective interventions. A significant opportunity has emerged with the advent of the NDIS but equitable benefit can only be achieved if additional and specialised measures are devised and implemented to appropriately screen for, and assess, incidence of ABI; disability services are appropriately resourced to overcome the pre‐existing disadvantage, and education, training and recruitment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders with the NDIS is undertaken to lead attitudinal changes in community to disability and health services. This paper concludes with recommendations for the NDIS to meet its laudable objectives.