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Putting Citizens First »
Engagement in Policy and Service Delivery for the 21st Century
Publication date: August 2013
This book explores the ways in which governments are putting citizens first in their policy-making endeavours. Making citizens the focus of policy interventions and involving them in the delivery and design is for many governments a normative ideal; it is a worthy objective and sounds easy to achieve. But the reality is that putting citizens at the centre of policy-making is hard and confronting. Are governments really serious in their ambitions to put citizens first? Are they prepared for the challenges and demands such an approach will demand? Are they prepared to commit the time and resources to ensure genuine engagement takes place and that citizens’ interests are considered foremost? And, more importantly, are governments prepared for the trade-offs, risks and loss of control such citizen-centric approaches will inevitably involve?
The book is divided into five parts:
setting the scene: The evolving landscape for citizen engagement
drivers for change: Innovations in citizen-centric governance
case studies in land management and Indigenous empowerment
case studies in fostering community engagement and connectedness
case studies engaging with information technology and new media.
While some chapters question how far governments can go in engaging with citizens, many point to successful examples of actual engagement that enhanced policy experiences and improved service delivery. The various authors make clear that citizen engagement is not restricted to the domain of service delivery, but if taken seriously affects the ways governments conduct their activities across all agencies. The implications are enormous, but the benefits to public policy may be enormous too.
Ted Freeman and the Battle for the Injured Brain »
A case history of professional prejudice
Authored by: Peter McCullagh
Publication date: August 2013
This book recounts some experiences of young Australians with catastrophic brain injuries, their families and the medical system which they encountered. Whilst most of the events described occurred two to three decades ago they raise questions relevant to contemporary medical practice.
The patients whose stories are told were deemed to be ‘unsuitable for rehabilitation’ and their early placement in nursing homes was recommended. In 2013, it is time to acknowledge that the adage of ‘one size fits all’ has no place in rehabilitation in response to severe brain injury. Domiciliary rehabilitation, when practicable, may be optimal with the alternative of slow stream rehabilitation designed to facilitate re-entry into the community.
Patients’ families were impelled to undertake heroic carers’ commitments as a reaction to nihilistic medical prognoses. It is time for the Australian health care system to acknowledge those commitments, and the budgetary burden which they lift from the system by providing family members with support to retrieve career opportunities, most notably in education and employment, which have been foregone in caring.
Medical attendants repeatedly issued negative prognoses which were often confounded by the patient’s long term progress. Hopefully, those undertaking the acute care of young people with severe brain injury will strive to acquire an open mind and recognise that a prognosis based on a snapshot observation of the patient, without any longer term contact provides a flawed basis for a prognosis. The story of these patients and of Dr Ted Freeman has wider implications.
Discretion and Public Benefit in a Regulatory Agency »
The Australian Authorisation Process
Authored by: Vijaya Nagarajan
Publication date: July 2013
This book explores the manner in which a variety of public benefits such as environmental protection and consumer safety have been accommodated through the authorisation process within competition law and policy in Australia. While the regulator’s use of its discretion can be explained as a triumph of practice over theory, this book explores the potential for competition principles to be imbued by the wider discourses of democratic participation and human rights. In doing so it makes a significant contribution to the Australian competition policy as well as reconceptualising the way in which discretion is used by regulators.
… a very important and creative contribution to the literatures on both business regulation in general and Australian competition and consumer protection law in particular. It pays special attention to an everyday regulatory function that is often ignored in scholarship. And it is very important in challenging—on both empirical and normative policy oriented grounds—a narrowly economic approach to competition law, and proposing an alternative understanding and practice for the public benefit test in ACCC authorisations.
— Professor Christine Parker
The data Vij Nagarajan has analysed is quite unique in its focus. It is a kind of data and analysis that has not been completed before in the international literature. It is well written, theoretically sophisticated and incisive in its policy analysis.
— John Braithwaite
Agenda - A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform: Volume 20, Number 1, 2013 »
Edited by: William Coleman
Publication date: July 2013
Agenda is a refereed, ECONLIT-indexed and RePEc-listed journal of the College of Business and Economics, The Australian National University. Launched in 1994, Agenda provides a forum for debate on public policy, mainly (but not exclusively) in Australia and New Zealand. It deals largely with economic issues but gives space to social and legal policy and also to the moral and philosophical foundations and implications of policy.
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Macassan History and Heritage »
Journeys, Encounters and Influences
Edited by: Marshall Clark, Sally K. May
Publication date: June 2013
This book presents inter-disciplinary perspectives on the maritime journeys of the Macassan trepangers who sailed in fleets of wooden sailing vessels known as praus from the port city of Makassar in southern Sulawesi to the northern Australian coastline. These voyages date back to at least the 1700s and there is new evidence to suggest that the Macassan praus were visiting northern Australia even earlier. This book examines the Macassan journeys to and from Australia, their encounters with Indigenous communities in the north, as well as the ongoing social and cultural impact of these connections, both in Indonesia and Australia.
Asia-Pacific Security »
Policy Challenges
Edited by: David W. Lovell
Publication date: May 2013
Since September 11, 2001, our newspapers have been filled with the ‘war on terror’; our governments have mobilised their resources for ‘homeland security’; and people everywhere are braced for more terrorist attacks.
Yet while the new threat is genuine, we must not lose sight of the continuing security concerns in the Asia-Pacific. Tensions persist on the Korean peninsula, in the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea, and in Kashmir. The region is well supplied with weapons of mass destruction and may face an arms race, and there are a range of pressing human security issues. Likewise, the strategic realities of the region remain linked with US power, and with the emergence of China as a key regional player.
The book examines the developing strategic relationships in the region, and clarifies the dilemmas for Australian policy-makers as they try to balance genuine engagement with the region against a long-standing and valued alliance with the United States.
Emerging from discussions between the Shanghai Institute for International Studies and the University of New South Wales at ADFA, Asia-Pacific Security has a particular relevance for foreign-policy professionals and scholars of the region.
Printed copies of this book may be ordered from ISEAS publishing.
A Good Life »
Human rights and encounters with modernity
Authored by: Mary Edmunds
Publication date: May 2013
This book is a story. It’s a story about ordinary people in very different parts of the world dealing with rapid change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It’s about times of turbulent and violent social upheaval and rupture with the past. It’s about modern times. It’s also about being human; what it is to be human in a modernising and globalising world; how, in responding to the circumstances of their times, different groups define, redefine, and attempt to put into practice their understandings of the good and of what constitutes a good life. And it’s about how human rights have come to be not abstract universal principles but a practical source of consciousness and practice for real people.
Drawing on the author’s experience as an anthropologist, the book examines different groups over the last three decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first: Thai factory workers over a period of two coups in the 1970s; Spanish nuns in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and the end of the Franco dictatorship; Aboriginal people in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia dealing with the impact of late colonialism and moves towards self-determination, from the 1980s to the present. Each of these groups has its own stories, illuminating ways in which, despite the assault of modernisation on deeply held traditional beliefs and practices, particular cultural understandings and practices continue to shape people’s responses to their novel circumstances. The very diversity of the studies presented in the book raises some of the most compelling moral and social questions of our time and invites the reader, both academic and lay, to focus on what it is that makes us human; whether there are human universals as well as cultural particularities; whether human rights provide universal norms and practices; what unites as well as divides us; and where morality, and understandings of a good life, can be sourced in a secular modern world.
“This is a book about hope, the hope that we have ways to live together in a rapidly changing world which will enable us to ‘live a good life in the modern world.’”
Hon. Fred Chaney AO.
Securing Village Life »
Development in Late Colonial Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Scott MacWilliam
Publication date: May 2013
Securing Village Life: Development in Late Colonial Papua New Guinea examines the significance for post-World War II Australian colonial policy of the modern idea of development. Australian officials emphasised the importance of bringing development for both the colony of Papua and the United Nations Trust Territory of New Guinea. The principal form that development took involved securing smallholders against the tendencies of other forms of capitalist development that might have separated households from land. In order to make household occupation of their holdings more secure and at higher standards of living, the colonial administration coordinated and supervised increases in production of crops and other agricultural produce.
Contrary to suggestions that colonial policy and practice ignored indigenous agriculture and concentrated on plantation crops grown by international firms and expatriate owner-occupiers, the study shows how the main focus was instead upon increasing smallholder output for immediate consumption as well as for local and international markets. Simultaneously development stimulated increases in consumption, including of goods produced through manufacturing processes and imported into the colony.
Only as Independence approached was the pre-eminence of the earlier focus upon smallholders weakened. In part the change occurred due to the political advance of the indigenous capitalist class and their allies seeking to extend their base in largeholding agriculture and related commercial activities. This advance and the uncertainty over which form of development would prevail once indigenes held state power in post-colonial Papua New Guinea stood in marked contrast to the definite direction pursued under the colonial administration of the 1950s and early 1960s.
My Country, Mine Country »
Indigenous people, mining and development contestation in remote Australia
Authored by: Benedict Scambary
Publication date: May 2013
Agreements between the mining industry and Indigenous people are not creating sustainable economic futures for Indigenous people, and this demands consideration of alternate forms of economic engagement in order to realise such ‘futures’. Within the context of three mining agreements in north Australia this study considers Indigenous livelihood aspirations and their intersection with sustainable development agendas. The three agreements are the Yandi Land Use Agreement in the Central Pilbara in Western Australia, the Ranger Uranium Mine Agreement in the Kakadu region of the Northern Territory, and the Gulf Communities Agreement in relation to the Century zinc mine in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland.
Recent shifts in Indigenous policy in Australia seek to de-emphasise the cultural behaviour or imperatives of Indigenous people in undertaking economic action, in favour of a mainstream conventional approach to economic development. Concepts of ‘value’, ‘identity’, and ‘community’ are key elements in the tension between culture and economics that exists in the Indigenous policy environment. Whilst significant diversity exists within the Indigenous polity, Indigenous aspirations for the future typically emphasise a desire for alternate forms of economic engagement that combine elements of the mainstream economy with the maintenance and enhancement of Indigenous institutions and ‘livelihood’ activities. Such aspirations reflect ongoing and dynamic responses to modernity, and typically concern the interrelated issues of access to and management of ‘country’, the maintenance of Indigenous institutions associated with family and kin, access to resources such as cash and vehicles, the establishment of robust representative organisations, and are integrally linked to the derivation of both symbolic and economic value of livelihood pursuits.
Edward M. Curr and the Tide of History »
Authored by: Samuel Furphy
Publication date: March 2013
Edward M. Curr (1820–89) was a pastoralist, horse trader, stock inspector, Aboriginal administrator, author and ethnologist. A prominent figure in the history of the Colony of Victoria, he rose to a senior position in the public service and authored several influential books and essays. He is best remembered for his nostalgic memoir, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria (1883), which has become a standard historical source.
This book is the first comprehensive biography of Curr and explores both his life and legacy. In particular, it considers his posthumous influence on the Yorta Yorta native title case (1994–2001), when his written account of the Yorta Yorta ancestors played a key role in the failure of the claim. By exploring Curr’s interactions with Aboriginal people—as a pastoralist and Aboriginal administrator—this book advocates a more nuanced, critical, and historically informed interpretation of Curr’s ethnological writings than was evident in the Yorta Yorta case.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.