Australian Inquiry Research Articles

Covid-19: Australian inquiry calls for establishment of a national centre for disease control and action to tackle inequities.

Covid-19: Australian inquiry calls for establishment of a national centre for disease control and action to tackle inequities.

Novel and Noteworthy Aspects of Australia’s Recent Investment Agreements and ISDS Policy: The CPTPP, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Mauritius Transparency Treaties

Investment treaties, and especially investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions, became a political hot potato from around 2011 when Philip Morris brought the first-ever ISDS claim against Australia under an old bilateral investment treaty (BIT) with Hong Kong. A Labor-Greens Government declared that it would no longer agree to ISDS provisions in future treaties, but when a centre-right Coalition Government regained power from 2013 it reverted to concluding treaties containing ISDS clauses on a case-by-case assessment. Australia therefore agreed to ISDS in FTAs with Korea and China, but not bilaterally with Japan. However ISDS-backed provisions apply between Australia and Japan since the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) can into force between them (and five other Asia-Pacific nations so far) from January 2019. Yet the Australian parliament engaged in robust debate about ratification of the CPTPP, with Labor Opposition (and Greens) parliamentarians continuing to voice concerns over ISDS provisions, despite the Philip Morris claim against Australia’s tobacco plain packaging having been rejected on jurisdictional grounds in 2015. This paper examines how (US-style) CPTPP drafting compares with two important recent investment agreements subsequently signed by Australia over 2019, namely with Indonesia as part of a wider free trade agreement (IA-CEPA), and with Hong Kong (AHKIA, alongside a bilateral FTA covering non-investment matters). AHKIA came into force from 17 January 2020, while IA-CEPA has been ratified by Australia but not yet by Indonesia. IA-CEPA adds a provision unique in the universe of over 3000 investment agreements world-wide, probably proposed by the Indonesian side: a compulsory mediation step prior to arbitration, if the host state requests mediation after the foreign investor initiates ISDS. The paper also highlights other features of both treaties that may help reduce delays and hence costs in ISDS. The paper summarises empirical data about delays and costs, as well as transparency around ISDS as another growing public concern, including some of our own empirical data provided as evidence to an Australian parliamentary inquiry into ratifying the CPTPP. We also examine the 2019 parliamentary inquiry that agreed with the submission that Australia should ratify the Mauritius (“UN ISDS”) Convention, thereby retrofitting extensive transparency provisions on pre-2014 treaties between Australia and other states that might also accede to that framework Convention. Even if Mauritius Convention ratifications proliferate, however, it will not retrofit extra transparency provisions to treaties concluded even after 1 April 2014 even among those states (say between Australia and Indonesia, where the investor chooses the ICSID Rules rather than UNCITRAL Rules option for arbitration). Accordingly, states ratifying the Mauritius Convention will still need to agree bilaterally to expand any still-limited transparency provisions in such post-2014 treaties, which is quite inefficient compared to a multilateral solution. Nonetheless, we conclude from these new developments that Australia is now better placed to play a more active role in guiding the future path of international investment treaty-making multilaterally and especially in the Asia-Pacific region.

Technical Fixes as Challenges to State Legitimacy: Australian Separated Fathers’ Suggestions for Child Support Policy Reform

Abstract This article assesses fathers’ evidence presented to an Australian inquiry into the child support scheme. We examine these data in order to address how fathers’ proposed child support policy solutions compared against Eekelaar’s critique of parents’ moral responsibilities to children and his identification of three substitute social bases for parents’ continued support. We find that despite the inquiry’s technical remit, fathers’ solutions challenged the very basis of child support as maintaining, reinforcing, or redressing their responsibilities to children. Here, we illustrate that such procedures may be unable to contain fundamental challenges to state legitimacy when dealing with contested social issues.

Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity

Who are the hidden faces that have contributed to the formation of an Australian identity? In what ways have individuals and groups been “excluded, neglected, or simply forgotten” in the dogged drive to narrate a cohesive story of identity‐making in Australia (p.2)? Such questions are addressed in this timely and comprehensive edited collection. As the volume's editor Paul Longley Arthur notes, the book sets out to uncover the “historical blind spots” that have been persistently concealed in the quest to uphold an “Australian settler dream” (pp.2‐3). Drawing upon a wide array of historical materials and approaches, this volume brings to the page histories of people who have been cast as peripheral to, or at odds with, commonplace Australian identity narratives. The uneasy colonial and gendered politics of the “official” archive, along with the complex interplays that exist between migration, memory, biography and belonging, are explored by an assortment of talented scholars who — when assessed as a whole — reveal the methodological richness of Australian historical inquiry and how it can interact with the conceptually robust disciplines of cultural and literary studies.

Pathos, death talk and palliative care in the assisted dying debate in Victoria, Australia

ABSTRACTMany submissions made by individuals to an Australian Parliamentary inquiry into end-of-life care which supported assisted dying used narratives of bad deaths of family or friends, or included stories by people suffering from chronic terminal illness. The submissions used the emotional tugs (pathos) of these narratives to support their case and to highlight the contemporary weaknesses of end-of-life care. This paper analyses the submissions, showing how pathos-based arguments were used in the public debate. Pathos-based arguments are a significant – and potentially very influential – feature in the debate on assisted dying. This paper also analyses the arguments advanced by proponents of assisted dying to show the weaknesses of Victoria’s current arrangements for end-of-life care, including the significant suffering of family member or friends; lack of access to good palliative care; and that patient needs were not met, sometimes for religious or value-based reasons.

‘It's Just about the Crime, Not the Victim’: Critical Insights from Australian Service Providers Working with People Who Have Been Trafficked

Human trafficking is a global public health issue, prevalent in Australia. Our study aimed to gain in-depth understanding of human trafficking and related service provision from a range of sectors, from the perspective of service providers. Adopting a qualitative descriptive approach, in-depth semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 13 service providers from a range of organisations across three Australian states. Service providers emphasised the challenges posed by Australia's predominately criminal justice approach to trafficking, in both policy and service provision, with some suggesting the current process is re-traumatising. Results support refocusing policy and services away from a criminal justice response to a more comprehensive and holistic response that includes greater recognition of the social determinants of health and the provision of tailored services. This requires increased collaboration between service providers, some of whom have very different agendas. The findings provide support for recommendations with the Australian government inquiry into modern-day slavery and therefore have important implications for policy and health services nationally to become more holistic in responding to human trafficking.

Gender Equality in Child Support Policy: Fathers’ Rhetoric of “Fairness” in a Parliamentary Inquiry

Child support payments extend separated fathers’ male breadwinning role across households, likely fuelling fathers’ perceptions of ‘unfairness’. By examining fathers’ written submissions to an Australian inquiry, we examine fathers’ claims of unfairness, which were expressed in terms of gender inequality. Here, we show how fathers adopted a gender equality discourse that left intact the existing gender order. Through expectations for equal treatment, men claimed the child support system would produce equality of outcomes, namely eliminating the redistributive need for child support payments. In doing so, fathers’ qualified support for gender equality advantaged men as payers while further entrenching gender inequity.

Oligopolist Speech and the Public Interest in Pharmaceutical Patent Law Reform

AbstractUnderstandings of the public interest underpin many law reform processes. The public interest is not a fully definable term and so reform bodies have to engage with a range of articulations of that interest. The negotiation of the different articulations, however, has not been explored empirically before. This article reports on a study of the claims to the public interest in a public Australian inquiry into potential abuses of the patent system by pharmaceutical companies. More specifically, submissions to the Pharmaceutical Patents Review are analysed and the results show “oligopolistic” tensions between competing views of the public interest—and with these views claiming primacy over more technical understandings of the issues. This lack of a single “public interest” allows dominant players to frame the debate to reflect their interests; and the tension between these players means that the debate, and the underlying problem, has not been subject to a resolution.

Implantable Medical Device Tells All: Uberveillance Gets to the Heart of the Matter

In 2015, I provided evidence at an Australian inquiry into the use of subsection 313(3) of the Telecommunications Act of 1997 by government agencies to disrupt the operation of illegal online services [1]. I stated to the Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications that mandatory metadata retention laws meant blanket coverage surveillance for Australians and visitors to Australia. The intent behind asking Australian service providers to keep subscriber search history data for up to two years was to grant government and law enforcement organizations the ability to search Internet Protocol-based records in the event of suspected criminal activity.

Process observations from an Australian cooperative inquiry project aimed at improving undergraduate student's experience

This paper reports on a collaborative student-for-student research project conducted in 2012, which aimed to improve the first year experience for students at one Australian University. A cooperative inquiry group was established to focus on the issues experienced by first year students from low socio-economic backgrounds, raise critical consciousness, question existing ideological constructs and develop a response to the identified issues in the form of a V-pod. Thematic analysis of recorded data from meetings and written data from group wiki pages revealed three key themes related to: sharing experience, sharing power and sharing time. Findings suggest a clear place for cooperative inquiry in the higher educational sector, but this must be supported by the time and space to establish collaborative relationships. When academics and students recast their roles as ‘the researcher’ and ‘the researched’ in the pursuit of co-created knowledge they are more able to rally against structural barriers and produce more meaningful outcomes.

Should the FSI revisit the philosophy of financial services regulation?

The Australian government's Financial System Inquiry (FSI) is charged with, among other things, refreshing the “philosophy, principles and objectives underpinning the development of a well-functioning financial system”. However, the FSI's Interim Report gives little indication that a fundamental rethink of the dominant “conduct and disclosure” approach to financial services regulation, derived from principles of capital markets regulation, is on the cards. While that approach remains a sound basis for regulating securities issuers and participants in capital markets, it is not clear that it provides the right framework for regulating fiduciary intermediaries in the wealth management sector, or providers of consumer financial products and services.

Selective hearing: The gendered construction and reception of Inquiry evidence

In this paper we present a case study of the gendering of evidence in family policy reform. We examine the characterisation of data as legitimate or illegitimate in a recent Australian Inquiry into child support and custody issues. Using critical discourse analysis, we examine how Inquiry committee members interpreted personal anecdotes and social scientific data presented by witnesses. Data were characterised as legitimate when confirming an existing stock story of fathers’ disadvantage in an unfair child support system; these data were treated as evidence of a widespread social problem. Data that challenged the stock story were rejected as offering an inappropriate basis for policy reform. We conclude that in these reforms, the type of data, be it social scientific or anecdotal, was not as important as its alignment with a priori understandings of the nature of the world and the policy problems to be solved.

Transnational cultural ties in a settler colonial world: Carnegie cultural philanthropy and the 1933 Australian museums inquiry

In the 1930s, the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) sponsored a series of inquiries into museum provision in countries of the British Empire. This article examines the 1933 inquiry into Australian museums and art galleries. It argues that existing analysis of the inquiry tends to dismiss its significance in terms of museum sector development in Australia. The article looks beyond this national focus to locate the Australian text within the context of the British Empire inquiries, and CCNY's concern about the underdevelopment of social and educational infrastructure in British colonies of settlement. The article deploys settler colonial theory to draw attention to the racial politics that surrounds the Australian inquiry, particularly evident in its concern with encouraging a “museum movement” in Australia's small towns and country districts.

Carnegie Cultural Philanthropy and the 1933 Australian Museums Inquiry

In the 1930s, the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) sponsored a series of inquiries into museum provision in countries of the British Empire. This article examines the 1933 inquiry into Australian museums and art galleries. It argues that existing analysis of the inquiry tends to dismiss its significance in terms of museum sector development in Australia. The article looks beyond this national focus to locate the Australian text within the context of the British Empire inquiries, and CCNY’s concern about the underdevelopment of social and educational infrastructure in British colonies. The article deploys settler-colonial theory to draw attention to the racial politics that surrounds the Australian inquiry, particularly evident in its concern with encouraging a ‘museum movement’ in Australia’s small towns and country districts.

Submission to the 2011 Australian Inquiry into Tobacco Plain Packaging by the House Committee on Health and Ageing

This is a submission made in 2011 to the Inquiry into Tobacco Plain Packaging conducted by the Standing Committee on Health and Ageing of the Australian House of Representatives. The submission addresses the implications of the law of the World Trade Organization for the Tobacco Plain Packaging Bill 2011 (Cth) as introduced into the House of Representatives on 6 July 2011.

IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE (SILENCED) CHILD

The rhetoric of the ‘best interests of the child’ frequently emerges in public and political debates concerning the changing nature of family and society. This article explores how the rhetoric was invoked in recent same-sex marriage debates in Australia. We analyse the public submissions to the 2009 Australian government inquiry into same-sex marriage to reveal the ways in which the abstract figure of ‘the child’ was deployed. It became evident that heteronormativity was privileged and upheld primarily through the discourse of children's best interests. Concern about the well-being of children raised by lesbian and gay parents was the pivotal argument by those who opposed same-sex marriage. Heteronormativity was reproduced through the claim that same-sex parenting is harmful to children and thus heterosexuality was positioned as the only ‘safe’ place for parenting. A small number of the submissions in support of same-sex marriage also based their arguments on the best interests of the child. Typically, these submissions positioned lesbian and gay parents as ‘just like’ heterosexual parents and in doing so they produced an idealised homonormative couple. This unwittingly reinforces heterosexuality through the construction of an ‘acceptable’ domesticated homosexuality, based on adherence to heteronormativity, which effectively marginalises other family forms and sexual behaviours. We argue that the rhetorical power of the ‘best interests’ argument relies on the absence of the voices of actual children raised by lesbian and gay parents and that this silencing has harmful consequences for these children.

Learning from past mistakes: The rural reconstruction commission’s use of history in Australian public policy making during the 1940s

Australia’s Rural Reconstruction Commission was established as a key element in its preparations for post-war reconstruction policy making. During the 1940s, the Commission undertook the most comprehensive inquiry ever conducted into Australia’s rural sector, publishing ten reports containing 330 recommendations on rural production and resource management, rural commodity marketing and rural lifestyles (Whitford & Boadle, 2008). In contrast with earlier writing about the Commission, the present article focuses on the Commission’s process to examine its extensive and wide ranging use of historical analysis to shape recommendations for public policy making. Findings reveal the Rural Reconstruction Commission’s venture serves both as a model of the usefulness in ‘applied history’ for providing guidance for the restructuring of Australian rural industries and demonstrates how history can be used to identify past mistakes in a rigorous, nonjudgemental fashion. In concluding, we argue no subsequent Australian inquiry has drawn so extensively on history or used it so explicitly in public policy making to date.

Crossing Divides

This article describes a study of a sample of submissions to an Australian government Inquiry into the Education of Boys, using a relatively new methodology for reviewing literature, called an argument catalogue. The study examines the usefulness of the methodology to an analysis of the complex field of boys’ education. The author argues that the argument catalogue approach offers a way of including and analysing all voices within the field, particularly the previously under-represented views of parents and practitioners and that despite complexities, there are commonalities that can be built on, which are critical to any positive change in this field.

Boys' underachievement and the management of teacher accountability

This paper investigates the ways in which discourses of teacher accountability were negotiated by teachers within hearings held for the Australian Inquiry into Boys' Education. In the Inquiry context, dominant interpretative repertoires positioned teachers as obliged to ‘acknowledge’, ‘address’ and ‘actively respond’ to an essentialised version of male students' ‘learning needs’. These repertoires functioned to equate the provision of ‘boy-friendly’ interventions with ‘professional’ classroom practice – suggesting significant discursive constraints on teachers' capacity to make sense of boys' underperformance outside of this dominant framework. Attention is paid to the ways in which these repertoires supported teachers to manage a positive identity in a context where they were positioned as largely responsible for male students' underperformance. At the same time, such constructions are interrogated with regard to their broader function in naturalising the surveillance of teachers, and reproducing boys' underachievement as something for which (particularly female) teachers have to account.

‘Healing the heartbreak’?: the role of testimony in the Australian inquiry into the separation of Indigenous children from their families

The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families provided a forum for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and others to speak of their experiences of removal in a national pubUc setting. The testimony provided to the inquiry fulfilled a number of functions and operated at a number of levels. The telUng of individual stories of removal was important to Indigenous people in terms of representing their experience and contributed to a level of ownership of the inquiry by those who participated. David Frances, chairman of the Kimberley Stolen Generations Steering Committee, for example, explained that the report was important in telUng the 'true story' of what happened to Indigenous people 'because future generations will read it to understand what happened to us'.2 In their work on Stolen Generations3 testimony, Rosanne Kennedy and Tikka Wilson point out that in the inquiry report, Bringing Them Home, testimony is used as evidence of the harms of removal, as part of the construction of a history of removal and as an address to the AustraUan community to soUcit an active engagement from readers.4 In this article, I want to consider how testimony functioned throughout the inquiry to faciUtate heaUng. At the beginning of the inquiry, the HREOC announced its aims to 'assist the heaUng process of those who have been affected... by past policies of assimilation' and to play a significant role in 'heaUng the nation' and to 'help prepare the way for reconciUation'.5 My analysis focuses on the practice of testimony as a personal and political tool engaged to heal individuals and the nation. The discussion draws on the international hterature on victims of trauma and truth commissions and particularly ideas that testimony can achieve heaUng.6 1 will also discuss the Umits to the heaUng potential of testimony through the inquiry, including the impUcations of soliciting testimony from certain Indigenous witnesses. More broadly, I will consider how a focus on heaUng impacted on the achievement of other goals, including adequate forms of redress. I argue that processes of heaUng are more compUcated and contingent than is recognised in the discourse of heaUng adopted by the inquiry. Background to the inquiry The AustraUan inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their famiUes followed years of political agitation by Indigenous organisations. From the early 1990s, Indigenous organisations including the National Secretariat for Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC), Link-Up (New South Wales) and the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western AustraUa (ALSWA) called for an inquiry into the damaging effects removal pohcies and practices had had on many Indigenous Austrahans' lives.7 The organisations were concerned that the harm suffered by Indigenous people separated from their families was not widely known and had not been adequately recognised or appropriately redressed by governments and others involved in the implementation of removal policies. At the influential Going Home Conference held in Darwin by the Northern Territory Stolen Generations (NTSG) in 1994, which brought together more than 600 Indigenous people who had experienced removal and/or institutionalisation, the then Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Robert Tickner, announced that he would push for some form of inquiry. On 2 August 1995, the Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, issued revised terms of reference to the HREOC to trace the laws, practices and policies under which Aboriginal children were removed from their families by duress or by force and to trace their effects.8 With an allocated budget of $1.5 million, the inquiry operated from December 1995 to April 1997, travelling to more than 32 Aboriginal communities, towns and regional centres and to every capital city across Australia. …