Melissa Bull

Governing drug use through partnerships: Towards a genealogy of government/non-government relations in drug policy.

Drug policy in Australia is underpinned by the idea of partnerships wherein the non-government sector is one important partner in both delivering services and contributing to policy and decision-making processes. This article presents a genealogy of the concept of government/non-government partnerships, tracing its emergence and development within drug policy discourse in Australia. We find that the rise of neo-liberal policies since the 1980s has been a key factor facilitating the emergence of government/non-government partnerships rhetoric in drug policy. Since the 1980s, the role of non-government organisations (NGOs) in drug policy has been articulated in relation to community responsibilisation in contrast to the welfarist reliance on expert intervention. We link the rise of this rhetoric with the neo-liberal turn to governing through community and the individualisation of social problems. Furthermore, although we find that governments on the whole have encouraged the service delivery and policy work of NGOs at least in policy rhetoric, the actions of the state have at times limited the ability of NGOs to perform advocacy work and contribute to policy. Constraints on NGO drug policy work could potentially compromise the responsiveness of drug policy systems by limiting opportunities for innovative policy-making and service delivery.

Negotiating the Challenges of Coerced Treatment: An Exploratory Study of Community-Based Service Providers in Queensland, Australia

The use of legal pressure to convince drug users to access treatment has become a popular drug-policy strategy in Australian and international jurisdictions. Providing drug treatment in this context necessitates partnerships between criminal justice agencies and drug treatment and support agencies, including community-based agencies. Drawing on data from qualitative interviews, this article explores the issues that coerced treatment presents for community-based service providers. We employ the analytics associated with Foucaults notion of governmentality to “make sense” of our research findings. We argue that these service providers negotiate the challenges of working in a criminal justice context by treating their clients as “informed choice-makers,” and by employing more liberal techniques of governance that rely on the possibility of freedom as well as the threat of constraint.

Representations of women and drug use in policy: A critical policy analysis

Contemporary research in the drugs field has demonstrated a number of gender differences in patterns and experiences of substance use, and the design and provision of gender-responsive interventions has been identified as an important policy issue. Consequently, whether and how domestic drug policies attend to women and gender issues is an important question for investigation. This article presents a policy audit and critical analysis of Australian national and state and territory policy documents. It identifies and discusses two key styles of problematisation of womens drug use in policy: 1) drug use and its effect on womens reproductive role (including a focus on pregnant women and women who are mothers), and 2) drug use and its relationship to womens vulnerability to harm (including violent and sexual victimisation, trauma, and mental health issues). Whilst these are important areas for policy to address, we argue that such representations of women who use drugs tend to reinforce particular understandings of women and drug use, while at the same time contributing to areas of policy silence or neglect. In particular, the policy documents analysed are largely silent about the harm reduction needs of all women, as well as the needs of women who are not mothers, young women, older women, transwomen or other women deemed to be outside of dominant normative reproductive discourse. This analysis is important because understanding how womens drug use is problematised and identifying areas of policy silence provides a foundation for redressing gaps in policy, and for assessing the likely effectiveness of current and future policy approaches.

Beyond faith: social marginalisation and the prevention of radicalisation among young Muslim Australians

ABSTRACT Counterterrorism responses in Australia have mirrored trends in other nations with a focus on pre-emption, including the criminalisation of activities defined as preparatory offences. Security-based transnational approaches to combat terrorist activity and propaganda alone are ineffective. Sometimes security measures can actually damage efforts to counter the appeal and take-up of violent extremism. While such measures should be used in domestic contexts where threats are critical or imminent, robust soft power initiatives are needed. Even though governments recognise the importance of soft power approaches, public discourse and commentary frequently reproduces negative stereotypes of young Muslim people linking them, through their religion, in negative ways to radicalisation and terrorism. This article describes empirical research investigating the impact of such discourses on the lives of young Muslim Australians. It demonstrates how dominant public discourse and counter-narratives add to feelings of marginalisation, even in those who are well integrated into Australian society. It argues that such social marginalisation contributes to the conditions of possibility for radicalisation and concludes by discussing some of the ways that young Muslim Australians maintain resilience in an environment that could easily be perceived as increasingly hostile and divisive.

The virtues of strangers: policing gender violence in Pacific Island countries

ABSTRACT This article considers the gap between reformist policy and practice in the policing of gender violence in Pacific Island Countries (PICs) with a key focus on Solomon Islands, Fiji and Kiribati. In doing so, we critically engage with two pervasive arguments in policing scholarship: (1) arguments regarding the value of hybridity and regulatory pluralism in PICs; and (2) the dominant critique of ‘policing by strangers’. We outline and acknowledge the compelling logics of these arguments, but we contend that they are called into question when (re)evaluated through a gender lens. Drawing on in-country fieldwork observations, relevant reports from government and non-government sources, and secondary literature, we begin to map out the empirical evidence that demonstrates the fragility of such positions in the case of policing gender violence. We go on to explore the complexity of institutional reform processes in PIC police forces by providing an overview of the intersection between informal operating cultures and police reform agendas – particularly as they relate to the policing of gender violence. We argue that Georg Simmel’s (1950) idea of the stranger, illustrating the contradictory experience of what it means to engage with someone who is spatially close but socially distant, offers a framework for exploring policing reform in the context of gender violence. Approaching gender violence through the lens of the ‘stranger’ potentially supports the development of a context-specific professional ethic that is able to effectively navigate conflicting forms of authority that currently undermine policing in PICs to provide better outcomes for women.

The Acoustics of Crime: New Ways of Ensuring Young People Are Not Seen and Not Heard

The topic of hooning has been a recent addition to the political agenda. Over the last 10 years states throughout Australia have engaged in law and order style auctions to see which jurisdiction can introduce the harshest penalties to prevent this behaviour. This paper explains that these legislative moves have not been inspired by the preservation of human life - which has tended to be the rationale behind the criminalisation of other traffic infringements like speeding. Instead it describes how the introduction of what safety experts describe as draconian penalties has been linked to the acoustics and amenability of the crime. This paper demonstrates how hooning laws and penalties that target the outlandish driver behaviour of some young people provide an exemplar of the authoritarian dimensions of neo-liberal rule. These harsh laws are a governmental response to restoring neighbourhood peace that employ tactics beyond the traditional punitive approaches which seek to discipline offenders.