Judith Brett

Should the nurse change the light globe?: Human service professionals managing risk on the frontline

Over the last two decades New Public Management, de-institutionalization and the growth of community care have radically altered the landscape of human service delivery in Australia. As a consequence of these changes, human service agencies have been compelled to develop mechanisms for regulating and managing the risks involved in frontline community care — and the management of risk is now pivotal to the practices of professional workers in this field. British research suggests that the emphasis on risk gives rise to greater monitoring and administrative supervision of workers and a focus on managerial rather than therapeutic skills. This article presents some early findings from an Australian study that finds a very different picture. Based on interviews with 24 social workers and nurses employed in community care, we found that these workers expressed a strong sense of agency when interpreting and negotiating the risk management policies of their respective organizations, and were focused primarily on the needs of their clients rather than bureaucratic procedures.

The Country, the City and the State in the Australian Settlement

The Australian Settlement, as formulated by Paul Kelly, had a sixth pillar: a settlement between the city and the country in which the state compensated people living in the country for the costs of remoteness and sparse settlement. This was underpinned by the reliance of Australian export performance on agriculture, by nation-building commitments to peopling the continent, and by agrarian beliefs in the virtues of country life. Australias egalitarianism had a spatial and regional as well as a class dimension. Changes in Australias economy, demography, and political culture have eroded these foundations, leaving rural Australia vulnerable to the neoliberal agenda. The dismantling of tariffs, the restructuring of agriculture, microeconomic reforms driven by National Competition Policy, and regional policy which stresses self-reliance, all treat rural Australia as a minor part of the nation rather than its economic and cultural foundation, and reject claims to special treatment. To give country Australia its own pillar makes visible the magnitude of the historic shifts which have taken place in the states relationship to rural Australia since 1983 and brings it into the main frame for understanding Australias abandonment of protective statism.

The inter-war foundations of Australian political science.

The foundations of the teaching and writing about politics in Australian universities were laid in the inter-war period, between the Paris Peace Conference and the outbreak of the Second World War, by men born and for the most part educated in the years of peace and hope before the First World War. When the discipline was established in the universities after the Second World War, it drew on the men, the books, the debates and the public interest institutions of the inter-war years which had already created a particular understanding of the purpose of teaching and writing about politics in the Australian academy.

Subjects and Readers: National and Transnational Contexts

The tension between national and transnational perspectives in Australian history has two dimensions: the nature of one’s questions and the sources mobilised to answer them; and the readership and places of publication. Drawing on her own experience of editing the journal Meanjin during the 1980s and writing Australian history, including her new biography of Alfred Deakin, Judith Brett argues that one can draw on transnational perspectives on Australian history in writing done primarily for an Australian public readership, that history written for a national readership does not need to be narrowly nationalist, and that transnational perspectives are a corrective to the parochial and sentimental in national storytelling. She also discusses the choice academic historians need to make between writing primarily for a national public and primarily for an international academic readership, and the current pressures pushing academics to the latter.