Andrew Parkin

Frustrated, reconciled or divided? The Australian labor party and federalism

The Australian Labor Party has always been, and remains, a complex entity which encompasses both centralist/national and decentralist/federal interests and values. The common interpretation that the party has been historically ‘frustrated’ by federalism but is now ‘reconciled’ with it thus exaggerates both the frustration and the reconciliation.

Liberal Democracy and the Politics of Criminal Justice in Australia

Liberal democratic states like Australia manage criminal justice issues in ways which reflect an inbuilt tension between liberal and democratic values. Liberal democracies are responsive both to liberal claims and to democratic claims. As a result, policy debates and strategies can oscillate between (on the one hand) liberal sensitivity to individual rights and opposition to enhanced state capacity and (on the other hand) democratically legitimised community norms and collective values. Four crime-related policy debates — about the creation and operation of the National Crime Authority, about strategies for combating drug-related crime, about gun control legislation and about identity systems to counter money laundering, tax evasion and public benefit fraud — illustrate the characteristic liberal democratic mode of politics in operation. The spectrum of policy responses to crime issues within liberal democratic political systems corresponds to an analogous spectrum within criminology which encompasses individualistic and structuralist conceptions of the nature and causes of crime.

Adelaide: Reflections on the scope for public policy

Abstract Metropolitan Adelaide, a crucible of urban policy innovation in the 1970s, has recently been the subject of pessimistic prognoses about its economic future. The pessimism is overstated. This article documents positive features — economic, institutional, historical — which might form the basis for greater optimism.

Cities without politics

Max Neutze, Australian Urban Policy, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1978. Leslie Kilmartin and David C. Thorns, Cities Unlimited: The Sociology of Urban Development in Australia and New Zealand, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1978.

Patrick Weller and the work of government

As embodied in the title of The craft of governing: The contribution of Patrick Weller to Australian political science, both the book and the scholar whose work it celebrates are engaged in the business of an academic and professional understanding of the work of government. The tone and tenor of the Festschrift take the significance of such an engagement largely for granted. That presumption, in the disciplinary context of this symposium appearing in the premier journal of Australian political science, is worth contemplating. The book’s co-editor R.A.W. Rhodes has elsewhere described the ‘complex compound of traditions’ that has created Australian political science. The origin of the dominant tradition is to be found ‘largely in the British humanities, notably history and philosophy’, and this tradition presents itself as ‘an interpretive empiricism laced with idealism’ (Rhodes 2009: 4). It was gradually complemented from the 1970s by an American-influenced, ‘modernist-empiricist’ approach with a greater social-science affinity for quantitative analysis (Rhodes 2009: 5). The two streams can loosely be understood as self-identifying respectively as ‘political studies’ and ‘political science’, to which have been added less dominant, but still important, radical and culturally oriented subthemes (Rhodes 2009: 6). It is revealing of the hybrid compromise that characterises today’s Australian discipline that the name of the professional association, the Australian Political Studies Association (APSA), embodies ‘political studies’, while the name of its journal, the Australian Journal of Political Science, embodies ‘political science’. Neither of the two dominant Australian traditions, nor their challenging subthemes, have been particularly executive-government-focused, even when they have been concerned with mainstream political institutions and mainstream political practice. Generalising mightily, I contend that in the Australian political science discourse

Book Review: Pluralism and the Politics of DifferencePluralism and the Politics of Difference. By GrilloRalphOxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. 272.

tion to strategies for assisting and protecting women and children. In his September 1999 speech to the General Assembly, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, spoke of an urgent need to forge an international consensus on humanitarian intervention. Fresh in his mind was the forced uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars and East Timorese. Masses in Flight should be required reading for all of those engaged in developing such a consensus. They will find it an excellent resource for articulating the challenges and opportunities facing the international community and for offering sound recommendations for change.

Interdependencies In Urban Research

The papers by Clive Forster and Andrew Beer achieve their intended purpose in identifying and, for the purposes of debate, contrasting two competing visions of the bases and ideals of university research. On the one hand, ‘basic’ research is portrayed as the province of the autonomous and self-motivated scholar, driven by curiosity and answerable only to disciplinary norms and peer evaluation, whose efforts expand knowledge for its own sake. On the other hand, there is the contracted researcher, who might happen to be employed in a university but whose research, based as it is upon whatever funding opportunities happen to present themselves, is oriented toward immediate applied relevance.

The State of American Political Science

Ada W. Finifter (ed.), Political Science: The State of the Discipline, Washington D.C.: American Political Science Assocaition, 1983.