AUSTRALIAN ADMINISTRATIVE LAW: INSTITUTIONS, REFORMS AND IMPACT

Over the last decade the Australian Government has enacted a package of legislative reforms dealing with administrative law, some aspects of which are radical and innovative. The reforms comprise the establishment of a general appeals tribunal to review certain administrative decisions on their merits, the appointment of a Commonwealth ombudsman, changes to the procedures and principles concerning judicial review of administrative action, the enactment of freedom of information legislation and the creation of an advisory body to monitor the new system of administrative law. The key features of these reforms are described in this article and some general observations are also made on the impact that the reforms have had on federal public administration.     

PRIVATISM AND PARTNERSHIP IN URBAN REGENERATION

In 1988, inner city policy took on a distinctly new style. The publication that year of the government brochure Action for Cities heralded the introduction of the 'enterprise culture' as the new instrument for the economic regeneration of the inner cities, the re-moralization into self-reliance of their inhabitants, and the defeat of welfare dependency. Simultaneously, the job of regeneration would be placed more firmly in the hands of Urban Development Corporations that would do the job that inefficient and ineffective local government had so signally failed to achieve. The dynamism of privatism would be harnessed by means of public subsidy to attract (or lever) private investment into the inner cities. The rationale or privatism as a means of abolishing urban deprivation however, rests on untested logic. At its simplest, new jobs would be created by inward investment, unemployment would fall, and there would be 'trickle-down' effects to those not in the labour force. There are other and more fundamental assumptions however, the contestable nature of which throws doubt on the possibility of the privatism strategy ever working. Principal among these are that there are discrete and insulated 'inner city economies' that can be regenerated; that it is even now possible to reverse history in the inner cities, and that to be of benefit to inner city residents, investment must be in the her cities themselves.