Alexander Jonathan Brown

Collaborative governance versus constitutional politics: decision rules for sustainability from Australia’s South East Queensland forest agreement

Australia’s Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) (1995–2000) involved a national program of bioregional assessment for native forest conservation and timber resource management. Eleven assessments covering 46 million ha or 6% of Australia, resulted in nine agreements (RFAs) between federal and state governments. While groundbreaking in some respects, however, the program had significant governance problems. Its main outcomes—intergovernmental agreements—were intended to overcome rather than resolve competing bodies of public opinion, and hence always risked entrenching rather than addressing underlying policy conflicts. This article reviews the problems inherent in the official approach, by contrasting it with the outcome reached in the major forest assessment not translated into an RFA. In September 1999, the South East Queensland assessment resulted in an agreement between lead timber production interests, key environmental NGOs and the state government, although rejected by the national government. Unique in Australia and rare in the world, this state-stakeholder agreement suggests the emergence of new decision rules for long-term resolution of biodiversity and natural resource conflicts. Consistently with other case studies, these centre on a fresh approach to integration of conflicting values, and the need for governments to accept more collaborative roles in environmental governance.

Subsidiarity or Subterfuge? Resolving the Future of Local Government in the Australian Federal System

During Australia’s centenary of federation (2001), the author, Local Government Association of Queensland and Courier–Mail newspaper surveyed 1,264 Queenslanders for their attitudes to future constitutional change, including a sample of 259 local government opinion leaders from across the state. The results of this pilot suggest ongoing political, functional and theoretical challenges surrounding the position of local government in Australia. Only 22 percent of local government respondents indicated a preference for the federal system to remain the same in another 100 years, against 70+ percent preferring significant structural change (50 percent seeking regional governments that replace the states). This higher–than–expected interest in change suggests that ongoing national reviews of the position of local government will need to reconsider federalism’s values and structures from first principles, including engagement by Commonwealth and states alike with the principle of ‘subsidiarity’, if they are to deliver any long–term gains.

Whistleblowing, its importance and the state of the research

To the uninitiated or the foolish, ‘whistleblowing’ may readily seem like a niche, almost boutique issue for research and policy making. The ‘disclosure by organization members (former or current) of illegal, immoral or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons or organizations that may be able to effect action’ (Near and Miceli 1985: 4), sounds like a very specific, perhaps even narrow or technical field of study. And yet, in the modern age of institutions, whistleblowing is now established as one of the most important processes – if not the single most important process – by which governments and corporations are kept accountable to the societies they are meant to serve and service. The ability for organizational ‘insiders’ to speak up about wrongdoing, and what happens afterwards in terms of corrective responses and treatment of the people involved, lies at the very heart of the health of all institutions and modern regulatory processes, right across society. In many ways, therefore, the subject could also not be broader, nor more far-reaching in terms of its complexities and consequences. This Handbook provides researchers and policy makers from around the world with a comprehensive overview of the state of our knowledge regarding this vital process, in light of the last 30 years of progressively more systematic research into whistleblowing. As well, it provides cutting-edge analysis of the conceptual and practical challenges that researchers should confront in the next decade, if our knowledge is to develop so as to better inform the way that whistleblowing is understood and responded to by organizations, regulatory authorities and governments. The Handbook follows and draws upon some important previous stocktakes of coverage and gaps in existing research (e.g., MesmerMagnus and Viswesvaran 2005; Miceli et al. 2008), and observations on the limitations of inconsistent and uncoordinated research (Miceli and Near 2013) as well as closely related fields like employee voice (Burke and Cooper 2013). The book also comes at a time when the reform of

Managerial responsiveness to whistleblowing: Expanding the research horizon

This chapter addresses how research into whistleblowing may need to evolve if it is to inform new priorities in management, regulation and public policy. It becomes crucial that more insight is gained into how the management processes of organizations and whistleblowing interact and interrelate – not simply in bad ways or with bad outcomes for whistleblowers, but across the spectrum. After all, research in different advanced democracies suggests that in these contexts, 50 per cent or more of internally voiced concerns are successful in having wrongdoing addressed or corporate practices changed; and that retaliation against whistleblowers is not as ubiquitous as generally assumed (see Smith, Chapter 10; also Smith and Brown 2008; Skivenes and Trygstad 2010b; Bjorkelo et al. 2010). Different success rates between organizations, industry sectors and legal regimes make it possible to begin cracking the code of what makes internal and regulatory whistleblowing successful in some cases, but not others.

Towards a more regional federalism: Rural and urban attitudes to institutions, governance and reform in Australia

Abstract Governance reform is increasingly understood in terms of partnerships, flexibility and growth in the ‘noninstitutionalised’ forms of decision-making, but what do Australians make of the governmental institutions still so crucial to the theory and reality of governance? In Australian discussions about new spatial approaches to governance, this question is especially fundamental because in its relatively brief 200 year postcolonisation history, Australia has come to have an unusually centralised system of government. This article explores the attitudes of Australian citizens towards their existing key institutions of governance, in particular the federal political system in its various spatial and hierarchical dimensions. We present some key findings from a random sample survey of 502 New South Wales rural and urban residents in late 2005, building on an earlier survey of 301 Queensland residents undertaken in 2001. The surveys indicate attitudes towards the present system and preferences regarding change, including options from new states to stronger regional institutions within the current framework. Findings are reported against demographic and other characteristics, including levels of satisfaction with present systems. Interstate and urban-regional comparisons are made. We conclude that high popular interest in change, which transcends the ‘urban-rural’ divide to a much higher degree than anticipated, provides a strong basis for a more open and less partisan political debate about institutional reform than may have been possible for some decades.

One continent, two federalisms: rediscovering the original meanings of Australian federal ideas

Federalism is usually described in political science as a single body of ideas—in Australias case arriving in the 1840s–50s and moving to constitutional reality in the 1890s. This article re‐examines the origins and diversity of federal ideas in Australia. It suggests that federal thought began influencing Australias constitutional development significantly earlier than previously described. This first Australian federalism had a previously unappreciated level of support in British colonial policy and drew on Benjamin Franklins American model of territorial change as a ‘commonwealth for increase’. The revised picture entrenches the notion of federalisms logic but also reveals a dynamic, decentralist style of federalism quite different from Australias orthodox ‘classic’ or compact federal theory. In fact, Australian political thought contains two often‐conflicting ideas of federalism. The presence of these approaches helps explain longstanding dissent over the regional foundations of Australian constitutionalism.

Introduction — Building Local Government

In this and the last issue, the Australian Journal of Public Administration has profiled issues of current importance to Australian local/regional government. Contributors to Building Local Government looked at organisational change, performance measurement, leadership and social–capital–building roles in local government. Future of Regionalism now focuses on local and subnational government generally, in the financial, administrative and constitutional context. A major trigger for this focus is the present inquiry of the Commonwealth House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration into the financial position of local government.

A Tale of Two Regionalisms: Improving the Measurement of Regionalism in Australia and Beyond

Brown A. J. and Deem J. A tale of two regionalisms: improving the measurement of regionalism in Australia and beyond, Regional Studies. Studies of regional identification are integral to the role of regionalism in political development, but how does one study regionalism when subnational political scales and regional political culture may be out of alignment? This question is tackled using Australia, a federation theorized as having possibly hit a regionalization ‘ceiling effect’, but which empirical study using a moderate relational approach shows to have not one regionalism but two within its political culture: formal ‘state-regionalism’ reflected in its federal system and a more organic ‘region-regionalism’ only thinly reflected in political structure, albeit apparently still consistent with federalism. Both are identified as politically salient and reflected in institutional preferences, but as also reinforcing debates that regionalization from a devolutionary perspective is far from complete, as manifested in citizen support for new regional government. The results better inform reform debates and provide departure points for research.

Understandings of whistleblowing: Dilemmas of societal culture

In this chapter, we demonstrate that for cross-cultural research into whistleblowing to date, this has proved a substantial challenge. So far, while the research record is important, it is relatively shallow. Overall, we argue it is time to develop a revised model (or models) for investigating and comparing how whistleblowing manifests in different societies, and the implications of cultural difference for how it is understood and managed. In the next section we sketch some of the basic implications of how concepts of whistleblowing have developed, followed by a basic overview of how the study of culture has interfaced with whistleblowing research to date – chiefly through the model of culture’s influences on organizational life developed by Hofstede (1980, 1991, 2002). In the third section we review the empirical record of this research since it began in the early 1990s, and which, despite the dominance of Hofstede’s model, gives very mixed results. The fourth section then highlights some further limitations of the research based on that model. We review other research raising questions about the model and present findings from our own research on the acceptability of whistleblowing in the United Kingdom and Australia, illustrating the limited explanatory (and even predictive) power of Hofstede’s model. In the fifth section, we discuss what kind of adapted or alternative research model might provide greater cross-cultural insights into whistleblowing. In particular, we suggest further examination of Schwartz’s approach (Schwartz 1994, Schwartz and Bardi 2001) as a possible research perspective, one that would allow for cultural shift and universals. The final, section discusses some key practical and methodological problems faced by researchers who wish to research whistleblowing cross-culturally, before conclusions are drawn.

Subsidiarity in the Australian Public Sector: Finding Pragmatism in the Principle

The principle of subsidiarity, commonly understood as the view that authority should be exercised by the lowest level of government competent to do so, is a key concept in understanding and reforming Australian federalism. In this article, we explore the way in which citizens with experience working in government react to the principle, and highlight that those with experience at different levels of government approach and value subsidiarity differently. Based on mixed-methods evidence, we propose that a pragmatic, problem-oriented approach to federalism and subsidiarity may cut through these differences, and allow policymakers to come together under a unified understanding of subsidiarity.