Financial Health in Australian Local Government: The Application of a Funding Assessment Model to Brisbane and Sydney City Councils

Local government financial viability measurement in an accrual budgeting environment poses complex challenges. Financial measures frequently generate conflicting results. A rating scale to assess financial management, constructed originally for South African municipalities (Dollery & Graves, 2009), represents a useful tool to analyze financial health trends. Applying a “Likert-like” scale to financial performance measures to assess “funding compliance”, the model in this article assists municipalities to avoid financial difficulties. To demonstrate the applicability of this model, we apply the model to the Brisbane City Council and the Sydney City Councils. Results show that the model represents a valuable aid to financial management decision-making.     

An analysis of budget compliance measurement in South African local government best‐practice financial management technical assistance programs, 2001—2003

South Africa's local government financial management best‐practice technical assistance program (known as MFMTAP) was to reform municipal financial management; achieve credible, realistic budgets and prevent financial failure. We consider whether a budget compliance procedure, developed by National Treasury (NT) to measure funding requirements compliance with the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) focusing on ‘realistic’ revenue budgeting, improves our understanding of technical assistance effectiveness. We assess a metropolitan municipality's compliance before, during and after advisory assistance. The compliance procedure was robust. Potential exists for wider application to assess best‐practice technical assistance (BPTA) program financial reform effectiveness. The findings from this single, important sample suggest that MFMA funding requirements are not being sustained 4 years after MFMTAP commencement, attributable to either BPTA performance or termination effects. We conclude that MFMA financial performance can be assessed by the procedure, from analysis of the metropolitan municipality performance assisted by a BPTA advisor for approximately 3 years. The analysis raises questions about BPTA program reform sustainability, but we add the caveat that conclusions cannot be drawn from a single sample metropolitan municipality, but a larger sample need be used for further methodology development to confirm its efficacy. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Changes in Perceived Social Support and Socioemotional Adjustment Across the Elementary to Junior High School Transition

One of the most fundamental factors related to psychological well being across the lifespan is whether a person perceives social support from important others in his or her life. The current study explored changes in and relationships among perceived social support (SS) and socioemotional adjustment (SEA) across the 1-year transition from elementary to junior high school. Two cohorts of students (N = 140) participated in the current study that took place across a 3-year time span. Analyses of the transition data for boys and girls together reveal declines in perceived total support and teacher support as well as an increase in self-reported school problems. When considering the sexes separately, girls?? perceived total support, close friend support and school support declined while boy??s self-reported school problems increased across the transition. Although social support did not emerge as a mediator or predictor for any of the socioemotional variables in the current study, results reveal that, in general, perceived social support and socioemotional functioning at the end of the last year of elementary school predicts perceived social support and socioemotional functioning at the end of the first year of junior high school. Study limitations and implications for research and practice are discussed.     

美国法律关于夫妻证据的一些规定

<正> 婚姻,给配偶一方提供了某种合法权利,即配偶一方有权拒绝提供不利另一方的证据。因此,便产生了配偶双方的权限以及依法提供证据的问题。婚姻的这种特殊关系,对维护夫妻间的     

State Courts, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Protection of Civil Liberties

Advocates of federalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, often cite the potential for enhanced protection of individual civil liberties as an emerging rationale for a federal system dividing governmental responsibilities between central and regional governments and central and regional judiciaries. Echoing this, some judicial officials and scholars, confronting an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, have called for state supreme courts to use the state constitutional grounds to preserve and increase the protections of the Bill of Rights. Using event count analysis, we examine state search-and-seizure cases for 1981 to 1993 to ascertain under what circumstances state courts would use this opportunity to eliminate Supreme Court review. We find that the relative ideological position of the state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court often prevents, or does away with the need for, liberal courts to use the adequate and independent state grounds doctrine to expand the rights of criminal defendants and that state supreme court justices react more predictably in the assertion of constitutional protection law than the general consensus suggests.     

Social space in the English medieval parish church

A theoretical approach to the organisation of social space is advanced with the aim to develop an understanding of the architectural space of the later medieval parish church in England, based on social practice. Refusing the general assumption of liturgical uniformity, the mass is taken as the template of religious practice most fundamental to such an understanding in the local context. Through religious practice the parish church became the locale for the constitution and reproduction of the Christian community. Social identities were necessaily constructed within that framework and as a result, it will be argued here, the church building must be seen to represent a domain of secular action within the field defined by the Christian liturgy.     

Filters of influence: The help-seeking process of African American single mothers living in poverty seeking mental health services for their children

There are a disproportionate number of African American children living in poverty who are in need of mental health services. African American children who live in poverty tend to underutilize mental health treatment due to the barriers their caregivers face; however, far less research has been conducted on the percentage of children who do access mental health treatment and the experiences of their caregivers in maneuvering through the barriers in their environments. This grounded theory study systematically generated a help-seeking theory that was constructed through the experiences of single African American mothers living in poverty who accessed mental health treatment for their children.     

Visual Culture as Historical Document: Sir John Drummond Hay and the Nineteenth-Century Moroccan Pottery in the National Museum of Scotland

The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh possesses a substantial collection of unpublished nineteenth-century Moroccan ceramics, including 49 pieces from the collection of Sir John Drummond Hay, British Minister Plenipotentiary in Morocco from 1845 to 1886. The Drummond Hay wares are of considerable interest to scholars of history and visual culture alike, as the personal collection of a major figure in nineteenth-century Anglo-Moroccan relations, and as representatives of a part of Moroccan visual culture that has been largely ignored within recent discourses of Islamic art history. This paper is the result of a research project into the history of the Drummond Hay ceramic group, examining not only the formal qualities of the ceramics but also their particular social history, and the insight their story provides into perceptions of the Maghreb in nineteenth-century Britain.