Indigenous rights discourse in Australia

The ability of Australia's indigenous people to create their own cultural identity and social reality is shaped profoundly by the Australian legal system in various ways. The 1992Mabo decision of the Australian High Court ‘created’ a right to land tenure for Australia's indigenous people. This ‘right’ has been further explicated by federal legislation in the post-Mabo era, in and around law. This essay analyzes the 1992Mabo decision in the context of governmental, judicial and wider social responses to indigenous issues. At several sites, it examines ‘indigenous rights’ discourse to illustrate the shifting meaning of ‘rights’ in legal currency in the indigenous debate. The essay suggests that the ‘rights’ discourse of legal liberalism has not yet provided meaningful plurality in the recognition of indigenous rights.     

AIDS Audit – HIV and Human Rights: An Australian Pilot

This article explores the Australian pilot of a human rights audit using ten indicators in the specific area of HIV/AIDS. The new methodology has three main roles: a monitoring device to measure human rights protection in a jurisdiction's legal system against international standards; an intervention to raise local dialogue and consciousness of rights-based legislation; and an advocacy tool to stimulate law reform. It uses a tripartite process balancing independent experts, government, and community representatives. This approach attempts to overcome some of the democratic deficits identified by Power's hypothesis on the explosion of regulatory audits (1997).     

Political Science: A Look at the Discipline from a Postgraduate Perspective

Research has become increasingly important within social science since the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The RAE has served to simultaneously focus the attention of academic institutions upon research output and emphasise the obvious penalties of poor performance in this area in terms of potentially lower academic status, lower income and lower student numbers. Academic institutions have, therefore, begun to pay an increasing amount of attention to postgraduate research and the needs of postgraduates. This article questions the extent to which institutions are actually meeting these needs and reviews the extent to which institutions reap the potential benefits that employment of postgraduates can bring.