Co-design or top-down welfare conditionality? An analysis of the impact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander submissions to six parliamentary inquiries into the Cashless Debit Card

The former Coalition Commonwealth Government consistently asserted that representative Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (hereafter Indigenous) organisations supported the introduction of the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) in multiple trial sites. Consequently, they depicted the CDC policy as an alleged exemplar of a co-designed policy model based on partnership with Indigenous community groups. This article examines the validity of this argument by analysing the views expressed by Indigenous organisations via written and oral submissions to the six parliamentary inquiries into the CDC from 2015 to 2020. Our findings suggest that with the exception of the first inquiry, most Indigenous submissions opposed the introduction or the expansion of the CDC. Yet, these critical views received only limited acknowledgement in the inquiry reports, and seem to have little or no impact on government policy concerning the CDC. It appears that the CDC policy is more accurately identified as a top-down policy imposed by government on local Aboriginal communities which, with some exceptions, neither requested nor consented to the policy.     

The Development-Insecurity Nexus in China’s Near-Abroad: Rethinking Cross-Border Economic Integration in an Era of State Transformation

Surprisingly, perhaps, China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative expresses a familiar mix of the security–development nexus and liberal interdependence thesis: Chinese leaders expect economic development and integration will stabilise and secure neighbouring states and improve inter-state relations. However, drawing on the record of China’s intensive economic interaction with Myanmar, we argue that the opposite outcome may occur, for two reasons. First, capitalist development is inherently conflict-prone. Second, moreover, China’s cross-border economic relations today are shaped by state transformation – the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of party-state apparatuses. Accordingly, economic relations often emerge not from coherent national strategies, but from the uncoordinated, even contradictory, activities of various state and non-state agencies at multiple scales, which may exacerbate capitalist development’s conflictual aspects and undermine official policy goals. In the Sino-Myanmar case, the lead Chinese actors creating and managing cross-border economic engagements are sub-national agencies and enterprises based in, or operating through, Yunnan province. The rapacious form of development they have pursued has exacerbated insecurity, helped to reignite ethnic conflict in Myanmar’s borderlands, and plunged bilateral relations into crisis. Consequently, the Chinese government has had to change its policy and intervene in Myanmar’s domestic affairs to promote peace negotiations.     

Intelligence and the management of national security: the post 9/11 evolution of an Australian National Security Community

Since 2001 expenditure on the security services has increased exponentially in Western democracies and particularly amongst the Five Eyes community of the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This has occurred in conjunction with the expansion of counter-terror laws. Yet somewhat problematically the phenomenon of Islamist inspired violence became more threatening to the internal security of western democracies in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This study examines the Western managerial approach to security using Australia as a case study. It argues that the growth of Australian security agencies since 2001 and their evolution into a National Security Community after 2008 has neglected basic maxims of political and constitutional prudence and eschews the modern state’s own contractual self -understanding of sovereignty and political obligation.     

The situation of women in the agribusiness sector in Africa

This practical note syntheses the proceedings of a gender forum on women in agribusiness, which took place in Nairobi, Kenya in April 2015. The workshop session of the forum focused on two themes: financing options and entrepreneurship capacities. The public session covered six main areas: (1) post-harvest food management, (2) policies to enhance affirmative action, (3) regional integration and international trade, (4) technologies, (5) land and water management for agriculture, and (6) the next generation of agribusiness entrepreneurs. The multi-sectoral forum brought together some key stakeholders across East Africa to share experiences and best practices, increase mutual learning, and expand public discourse on the subject.     

Drugs of choice,drugs of change: Egyptian consumption habits since the 1920s

Abstract

Much has been written and published about the 25 January 2011 Egyptian revolution from the perspective of contemporary history and political science. Much less attention has focused on social policy. I am unaware of any scholarly material that has dealt with illicit drugs during the critical 2011–2016 period, yet increasing drugs consumption provided a social backdrop to the events of that period. This paper identifies historical trends in illicit drugs consumption over the course of the last century to the beginning of the Arab Spring. During much of this period hashish was the drug of choice. This paper argues that drug consumption was on the rise in Egypt well before the downfall of President Husni Mubarak in February 2011, but that it has grown markedly since the ousting of the former president. It will ask which have been and are the drugs of choice in contemporary Egypt. It will further ask how this composition has changed and why, giving special focus to the relatively new mass, opioid drug, Tramadol.     

Caught in-between: social developments and young men in urban India

Abstract

The lives of young middle-class men in India are greatly different to their parents and older generations. As India economically liberalizes, there is a generational gap that has developed. Young men begin to start bridging this gap by living their lives through various negotiations and performances of appropriate masculinities in the contexts that surround them. Social developments in India mean that processes of consumption, urbanization and new practices of romantic and sexual expression have to be managed alongside older gendered expectations and responsibilities on young men. Through an ethnographic approach, this paper explores the social and cultural realities of young Indian men to understand how they are caught in-between and creatively manage their lives and relationships.     

IT and Law,and Law Schools

If 'computing and law' as a discipline is to push forward and develop, it will do so best within the context of the law school rather than as a joint enterprise between law and other disciplines. It is in the law school that the understanding of the nature of law is at its height. Yet there are problems here-law schools have a strained relationship with technology and their concept of the breadth of 'legal scholarship' can be limited by conventional (or ideologically-biased) views of law and an undergraduate-oriented view of the law school's purpose. There are also problems arising from the nature of communications between lawyers and computer scientists. In this article, I highlight these problems and also argue for a more developed and extended view of legal scholarship which will be able to incorporate study and research of the impact of the computer upon legal society as well as the legal control of the unwanted elements arising from these new technologies. Most writings on IT and the law school concentrate upon its use as an educational tool. My interest here is not so much in this side of things, but in the research culture of the law school. Whilst there is sometimes a view that the linkage of law school and IT is purely related to the use of technology in legal education, the remit is wider and includes the understanding of the link between substantive law and the context of the new computerized world and also the impact of the computer in the practice of law. This latter aspect is becoming increasingly important with the Woolf reforms and computerization of the procedural elements of law, but also in substantive law: for example, administrative systems are becoming more and more mediated by technology, and administrative law must be reviewed and re-worked in this context.     

'Groping toward coexistence': US China policy during the Johnson years

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XXX, China (United States Government Printing Office: Washington, 1998).     

America's backyard

Eric Paul Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbour Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. Pp.xii + 337. ISBN 0 8223 2123 8 (paperback).

Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp.257. ISBN 0 8078 4764 X (paperback).

William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp.xvi + 773. ISBN 0 8078 2395 3 (hardback).