Local Government Failure in Australia? An Empirical Analysis of New South Wales

The complexities of contemporary local governance in Australia and other advanced democracies provide social scientists with significant theoretical and empirical challenges. Drawing on recent developments, including public choice theory, economists have sought to develop taxonomic systems of government failure specifically tailored to local government circumstances. This paper seeks to extend the Dollery and Wallis (2001b) taxonomy of local government failure by invoking Olson's (1965) concept of political entrepreneurship. The paper then attempts to determine the empirical validity of the augmented taxonomy by examining it in the context of NSW local government.     

Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America

In the tradition of research on political tolerance and democratic rights in context, this study uses a national survey of Americans conducted shortly after the September 11, 2001 attack on America to investigate people's willingness to trade off civil liberties for greater personal safety and security. We find that the greater people's sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties. This effect interacts, however, with trust in government. The lower people's trust in government, the less willing they are to trade off civil liberties for security, regardless of their level of threat. African Americans are much less willing to trade civil liberties for security than whites or Latinos, even with other factors taken into account. This may reflect their long-standing commitment to the struggle for rights. Liberals are less willing to trade off civil liberties than moderates or conservatives, but liberals converge toward the position taken by conservatives when their sense of the threat of terrorism is high. While not a forecast of the future, the results indicate that Americans' commitment to democratic values is highly contingent on other concerns and that the context of a large-scale threat to national or personal security can induce a substantial willingness to give up rights.     

How Well Does Accrual Accounting Fit the Public Sector?

In this 'controversy' we challenge the unqualified application of full accrual accounting within the Australian public sector. In particular, attention is directed to the recognition and valuation for financial reporting purposes of public sector resources that are of a non-financial nature, such as library and museum collections. Our main contention is that attempting to recognise such resources at monetary values within the financial reports of public sector organisations is a contrived, imprecise and inappropriate practice that threatens to occlude rather than enable the accountability of public sector institutions and their managers. Building from this accountability theme, we present perspectives on promoting accountability for the technical accounting practices which have been imposed within the public sector.     

The calculus of dissent: Party discipline in the British Labour government, 1974–1979

The strength of political parties is taken to be one central difference between the political systems of the United States and the United Kingdom. We analyze defection from party line voting within the British Labour Party in the House of Commons between 1974 and 1979 to suggest that this dichotomy is overdrawn. In fact, the analysis shows that the dynamics of legislative behavior are quite similar in the two systems, notwithstanding the significant institutional differences between a separation of powers system and the West-minster model. Members of Parliament, like American Congressmen, balance the demands of their constituents, activists within their local party, and party leadership, as well as wage intraparty battles over the direction of policy.     

On the (mis)measurement of legislator ideology and shirking

In this paper, we show that current statistical measures of legislator's shirking are implicitly based on the electoral concept of a unique majority rule equilibrium point in the policy space where elections are contested. We note that such equilibria do not exist generically and present statistical results showing that cross-sectional regressions where legislators' voting indices are predicted by district average demograhic and economic data are mis-specified. We also discuss a weaker equilibrium construct, the uncovered set, and present statistical evidence showing that differences in voting behavior between Senators from the same state are positively related to the heterogeneity of the electorate. We argue that current evidence alleged to show shirking by Senators is equally consistent with Senators who perfectly represent an idiosyncratic constituency that cannot be represented by district average data.     

Australian Federalism and the Debate Over a Bill of Rights

Successive Australian Labor governments have tried to nationalizestandards for the protection of rights either by means of astatutory bill binding on the states under the Commonwealth'smuch expanded external affairs power, or by further entrenchingspecific rights in the Constitution. All these attempts havefailed for a variety of political and constitutional reasonsincluding, importantly, the strength of Australia's establishedsystem of federalism and parliamentary responsible government.The article examines the constitutional issues underlying thedebate over a bill of rights for Australia, arguing that Labor'sattempts to implement a bill of rights have been inspired bya preference for more centralized government whereas the defeatof such initiatives indicates, the established strength of Australianfederalism.     

A rare mutation in the amelogenin gene and its potential investigative ramifications

Over the past few years, the Australian forensic science community has adopted a common methodology and technology in the application of DNA profiling for investigative and forensic purposes. The ultimate objective of this initiative is the establishment of a national DNA database similar to that used in the UK. An integral part of this methodology is the use of "Profiler Plus," a nonaplex of STRs combined with amelogenin, a locus utilized for sex determination. This paper reports the results from a case where a mutation in the annealing region of the amelogenin primers appears to have resulted in the failure to amplify the amelogenin Y-homolog from a phenotypically normal male. The result was confirmed using two different primer sets that amplify different regions of the amelogenin gene. This situation suggests that the genetic determination of sex based on the amelogenin sequences from specimens of unknown origin, such as crime scene samples, should not be considered infallible.     

Teenage pregnancy and perinatal mortality

In the general population teenage pregnancies present an elevated rate of perinatal mortality compared with pregnancies of women in their twenties. In two large-scale university hospital studies (one American, one Danish), the teenage pregnancies showed lower perinatal mortality than those of any other age group. This article attempts to determine the origin of these differing results. A comparative analysis was conducted focusing on methodologies, subject characteristics, and treatment procedures involved in the two classes of studies, which involved representative populations and university hospital samples. The uniformly high quality medical treatment provided to all subjects in the university hospital samples contrasted with the uneven quality of treatment found in population studies constituted the most important difference. Since pregnant teenagers generally tend to be of lower socioeconomic status, they are likely to receive inferior medical care. It was argued that this factor could, to large extent, be responsible for the elevated mortality rates found in teenage pregnancies in representative populations.This study was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Grant Award Number 75-7-060, The Consequences of Family Structure and Maternal State for Child and Mother's Development, Birgitte R. Mednick, Principal Investigator.Received her Ph.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1975. Current interests are interactions between biological and social variables.Received his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska in 1955. Current interests are learning, instructional development, and the delivery of human services.Received his Ph.D. from the University of New Zealand in 1954. Current interests are interactions between biological and social variables.