ADMINISTRATIVE CHRONICLE VICTORIA*

In its final months the outgoing Thompson Liberal Ministry was largely pre-occupied with the implementation of its New Directions strategy. It introduced a public service bill in December to bring about greater effectiveness in the public service and ensure that its policy priorities were understood, thus complementing the Effectiveness Review Committee already set up, and it began a review of the three central coordinating agencies, the Public Service Board, the Treasury and the Department of the Premier, with an independent American consultant. The thrust of these three measures was to advise the government on proposals to set up new departments, relocate personnel and manpower resources, to set up programs for effectiveness reviews, and to bring forward amendments to the Public Service Act of 1974 which had followed Sir Henry Bland's inquiry in the early 1970s. These were intended to give the Public Service Board extended powers to allow it to conduct effectiveness reviews into statutory authorities, to extend Board employment powers to such authorities and to bring them into the public service framework, ensuring a more cohesive and less fragmented State public service. Senior staff could now be employed on term appointments, with performance-oriented objectives, giving greater flexibility at the top. And finally, the Board was to have power to become involved in specific industrial issues at the departmental level, sharpening its current generalized industrial powers.     

Procedural fairness and work group responses to performance evaluation systems

In a variety of settings, procedures that permit predecision input by those affected by the decision in question have been found to have positive effects on fairness judgments, independent of the favorability of the decision. Two major models of the psychology of procedural justice make contrary predictions about whether repeated negative outcomes attenuate such input effects. If such attenuation occurs, it would lessen the applicability of procedural justice findings to some real-world settings, such as organizations, where procedures often provide repeated negative outcomes. The present laboratory investigation examined the procedural and distributive fairness justments produced by high- and low-input performance evaluation procedures under conditions of repeated negative outcomes. Thirty-five three-person groups of male undergraduates participated in a three-round competition. Groups either were or were not allowed to specify the relative weights to be given to two criteria used in evaluating their performance. All groups received negative outcomes on each of the three rounds. A second experimental factor varied whether or not the group learned after losing the second round that it could not possibly win the third and final round of the competition. Measures of procedural and distributive fairness showed that the high-input procedure led to judgments of greater procedural and distributive fairness across all three rounds. The input-based enhancement of fairness occurred regardless of whether reward was possible. The implications of these findings for theories of procedural justice and for applications of procedural justice to organizational settings are discussed.     

Fatal dog maulings associated with infant swings

We present three cases of fatal dog maulings of infants placed in mobile infant swings, a phenomenon not previously described in the literature. In each case, the victim was left in a mobile swing, unsupervised by an adult, and the attacking dog was a family pet. Case 1 involved an 18-day-old male infant attacked by a pit bull; Case 2 involved a 3-month-old male infant attacked by a Chow Chow and/or a Dachshund, and Case 3 involved an 18-day-old female infant attacked by a Labrador-pit bull mix. These cases not only underscore the importance of not leaving young children unattended in the presence of pet dogs, but also raise the possibility that mobile swings may trigger a predatory response in dogs and thus may represent an additional risk factor for dog attack.     

VICTORIA

The Victorian Liberal Premier, Richard Hamer, in adjourning the 1980 parliamentary session with the traditional “Christmas felicitations”, made special reference to the record number of sitting days and the longer daily average of sitting hours achieved. Labor Opposition Leader Frank Wilkes in turn drew attention to the total of 126 bills introduced during the spring session, of which 101 had been instigated by the government and 25 by private members. Such an arduous and concentrated parliamentary schedule has obvious policy implications, but also prompts a query about its administrative consequences. To what extent was the mass of legislation dealt with by the last Victorian State parliament directed towards administrative ends as well as to the Liberal government's more obvious political goals?