A Troika of Agitators: Three Comintern Liaison Agents in Australia, 1920–22

Peter Simonoff, Consul‐General in Australia for the Bolshevik regime from early 1918 to mid‐1921, is known to have played an active role in the founding of the Communist Party of Australia in 1920, and in promoting the “Trades Hall” faction against the ASP faction when the new party divided. Paul Freeman and Alexander Zuzenko, both deported from Australia in 1919, made return visits to Australia from Moscow in 1921 and 1922 to carry the process further. Freeman, however, backed the ASP faction, while Zuzenko lent his support to “Trades Hall”. This paper uses previously unknown reports to the Comintern's Executive Committee (ECCI) from Simonoff, Freeman and Zuzenko, as well as Australian sources, to study the relations between these men and their mutually contradictory actions.     

Negotiated Case-ending Settlements: Ways of Speeding up the (Court) Process

The subject of this article is a special type of fast-tracked case-ending decisions called “negotiated case-ending settlements”. Those proceedings are based on a kind of agreement between the parties, end with a real conviction of the offender and their legal consequence is a true but mitigated punishment. They can be found in six of 11 countries studied, namely, in England & Wales, Croatia, France, Hungary, Poland and Spain. The English guilty plea procedures, the French appearance before a court after prior admission of guilt and the Polish prosecutor’s application for a conviction to be rendered without a trial as well as the voluntary submission to penalty are examined more closely here. The comparative study focuses on the stage, where the negotiation is made, the conditions for the use of these settlements and the PPS’s role therein.     

White Agitation For An Aboriginal State In Australia (1925-1929)

This article evaluates proposals in the late 1920s for the creation of an Aboriginal State in either a part of the Northern Territory or South Australia. In the proposals for an Aboriginal State, Aborigines were to own their own land, live according to their own customs, govern themselves, and have Aboriginal Members of Parliament representing them in the Federal Parliament. The study analyses the intellectual foundations of the proposals in the political organisations of the Maori of New Zealand. It examines Aboriginal people's ambivalence to the idea, which arose out of their bitter experience of living through previous plans made supposedly for their benefit by white society.     

The impact of foreign and state ownership on post-transition industrial concentration: the case of Polish manufacturing

This paper reports an analysis of the determinants of the level and changes in Polish industrial concentration in the early post-transition era. In particular, the relative effects of foreign and state ownership are examined. The empirical evidence is based on a panel of 144 Polish manufacturing industries over the period 1989–1993. The results suggest that both state and foreign ownership have a significant impact on industry concentration and this relationship is U-shaped. Minimum efficient scale is found to be the only other factor to impact on industry concentration.