Howard Government Research Articles

Indigenous Rights and the 1991-2000 Australian Reconciliation Process

The formal reconciliation process in Australia was conducted between 1991 and 2000 and aimed to reconcile Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples by 2001. In this paper, I detail the failure of both this reconciliation process and governments, in particular the Howard Government, to recognise Indigenous rights, such as sovereignty, a treaty, self-determination and land rights.

‘FEMINISM FAILED ME’

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. For recent discussions on feminism, motherhood and childcare, see Baird and Cutcher (2005 Baird, M. and Cutcher, L. 2005. One for the father, one for the mother and one for the country: An examination of the construction of motherhood through the prism of paid maternity leave. Hecate, 31(2): 103–13. [Google Scholar]); Dever (2005 Dever , Mary-Ann . 2005 . Baby talk: The Howard government, families, and the politics of difference . Hecate 31 2 : 45 61 . [Google Scholar]); Manne (2005 Manne , Anne . 2005 . Motherhood: How should we care for our children? Crows Nest, NSW : Allen & Unwin . [Google Scholar]); Van Acker (2005 Van Acker , L. 2005 . The Howard government's budgets: Stay-at-home mothers good—single mothers bad . Hecate 31 2 : 90 102 . [Google Scholar]). 2. See Brett (1992 Brett , Judith . 1992 . Robert Menzies: Forgotten people . Sydney : Macmillan . [Google Scholar]) for how Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies used the trope of ‘forgotten people’ to great political effect. 3. Pru Goward's appointment as the Prime Minister's women's policy adviser and head of the Office of the Status of Women in April 1997 was criticised by feminists such as Ann Summers because she did not have a background in feminist politics or activism. 4. As of 2002, under the Workplace Relations Act 1996, permanent full-time and part-time employees who had 12 months’ continuous service with their employer had a minimum entitlement to 52 weeks of unpaid parental leave following the birth or adoption of a child.

Changes in Poverty Rates during the Howard Era

Abstract This article considers changes in poverty rates under the Howard government. We also make three methodological contributions. We consider the statistical significance of the estimated changes in poverty. We propose a decomposition technique that reconciles the trends in absolute and relative poverty. We also use ‘poverty profiles’, which illustrate sensitivity to alternative poverty lines. We find decreases in absolute poverty and increases in relative poverty, both of which are statistically significant over a range of poverty lines. At a poverty line equal to half of the median income, the increase in relative poverty is statistically significant for all people and borders on significance for children.

The 'Your Rights at Work' Campaign: 2005-2007

In 2007 the Howard Government was swept aside in a landslide at a Federal Election. On that day, many hundreds of Your Rights At Work activists were on polling booths around the country - frequently outnumbering the major parties - in what was the key phase of the campaign.
 
 The previous years had seen the largest trade union campaign for industrial rights in decades. This paper looks at how that campaign was organised, and asserts that the victory of the campaign in defeating the Howard Government was not the result of a silver bullet strategy, but a mix of campaign components in a specific context. While certain strategies were new, in many ways the Your Rights At Work campaign was a back to basic initiative that had its success on the back of local organising across the nation.

The geographic distribution of private health insurance in Australia in 2001

BackgroundPrivate health insurance has been a major focus of Commonwealth Government health policy for the last decade. Over this period, the Howard government introduced a number of policy changes which impacted on the take up of private health insurance. The most expensive of these was the introduction of the private health insurance rebate in 1997, which had an estimated cost of $3 billion per annum.MethodsThis article uses information on the geographic distribution of the population with private health insurance cover to identify associations between rates of private health insurance cover and socioeconomic status. The geographic analysis is repeated with survey data on expenditure on private health insurance, to provide an estimate of the rebate flowing to different socioeconomic groups.ResultsThe analysis highlights the strong association between high rates of private health insurance cover and high socioeconomic status and shows the substantial transfer of funds, under the private health insurance rebate, to those living in areas of highest socioeconomic status, compared with those in areas of lower socioeconomic status, and in particular those in the most disadvantaged areas. The article also provides estimates of private health insurance cover by federal electorate, emphasising the substantial gaps in cover between Liberal Party and Australian Labor Party seats.ConclusionThe article concludes by discussing implications of the uneven distribution of private health insurance cover across Australia for policy formation. In particular, the study shows that the prevalence of private health insurance is unevenly distributed across Australia, with marked differences in prevalence in rural and urban areas, and substantial differences by socioeconomic status. Policy formation needs to take this into account. Evaluating the potential impact of changes in private health insurance requires more nuanced consideration than has been implied in the rhetoric about private health insurance over the last decade.

The tribulations of reusing and repackaging data: A review of “how has school productivity changed in australia?”

In their paper,How has school productivity changed in Australia? social economists Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan (2008)1 attempt to show that Australian (government) schools and their teachers’ productivity has declined by some 73 per cent between 1964 and 2003 compared to an overall increase of 64 per cent across the Australian economy. In response I contend that Leigh and Ryan use an inappropriate statistical device to "decompose" student demographics to arrive at conclusions that contradict the original positive assessment of student standards by independent authorities (Rothman, 2007). Their work, which for many years seemed to be the foundation stone for Howard government education policy has by their own admission (A. Leigh & C. Ryan, personal communication, February 14, 2008), never been put to the test of peer review prior to publication. This paper critically analyses and contests their research by placing their claims within a social policy context that has subtly changed from one where teachers can make a difference to teachers are the difference.

Australian climate policy and the Asia Pacific partnership on clean development and climate (APP). From Howard to Rudd: continuity or change?

This article explains, first, why Australia’s government under John Howard, together with the United States Bush administration initiated the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP) and, second, why the succeeding Rudd government continued to support this initiative. Climate policy under the conservative Howard government (1995–2007) in Australia was largely dictated by fossil fuel and mineral sector interests, and reflected a close alliance with the Bush administration. The Howard government shunned the Kyoto Protocol, refused to set national binding greenhouse gas reduction targets and preferred voluntary cooperative measures with industry. The APP was part of the Howard government’s strategy to demonstrate some policy movement on climate change while postponing serious action. Climate change was a key issue in the election of the Rudd Labor government in Australia in December 2007. The Rudd government quickly ratified Kyoto, adopted emission reduction targets, and moved to introduce emissions trading. The Rudd government’s decision to continue involvement with the APP, albeit with diminished funding, was a pragmatic one. The APP was supported by industry and provided bridges to China and India—both key countries in the post-2012 UNFCCC negotiations. Finally, in order to assess the long-term outlook of the APP, the article provides a preliminary assessment as to whether the APP advances technology transfer.

The role of the Asia Pacific Partnership in discursive contestation of the international climate regime

After withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol, the US Bush Administration and the Australian Howard Government pursued an international climate change policy focussed on voluntary international agreements outside the UN climate negotiations. This strategy included the formation of several climate agreements directed at technology development, including the 2005 Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP). The APP provides a model for international climate change policy directed at voluntary national greenhouse gas intensity targets, technology development through sectoral public–private partnerships and technology diffusion through trade. This article situates the APP within these US and Australian inspired climate agreements formed outside the UN negotiations. Backstrand and Lovbrand’s (in M. Pettenger (ed.) The social construction of climate change: power knowledge norms discourses, 2007) discourse analysis in relation to the international climate negotiations is used to explore differences between the APP and UN climate treaties. We find the APP embodies a discourse of what we call ‘deregulatory ecological modernisation’ that promotes limited public funding to ease informational failures in markets for cleaner technologies and management practices. The deregulatory ecological modernisation discourse is a deeply intensive market liberal approach to international climate change policy, which contests binding emission reduction targets and the development of a global carbon market. The USA, Australia, Japan and Canada represented a core group of countries that used the APP to promote the deregulatory ecological modernisation discourse and thereby contest any deepening of developed nations' emission reduction targets for the post-2012 period. However, with changes of leadership and new parties in power in the USA and Australia, it appears that the deregulatory ecological modernisation discourse has lost ground compared to a reengagement with discourses supportive of developed country emission reduction targets and equity-based adaptation and technology transfer assistance for developing nations.

The quest for ‘wriggle room’: Australia and the Refugees Convention, 1951–73

The extent to which the Pacific Solution and other refugee policy developments under the Howard government were contested within Canberra circles will not be known until cabinet files are opened many years hence. However, if recent research into the White Australia policy is anything to go by, the files may shed unappreciated nuance on the context and reasoning behind such developments. We cannot pre-empt this research, but we can explore documents to which we do have access to deepen insight into Australia's refugee policy foundations, and to prepare the ground for more informed assessments of recent developments. Using archived policy files, this article examines the internal debates that surrounded Australia's accession to the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees. The picture that emerges challenges simplistic assessments as to the motives of policy makers of the time. It also shows how different government departments—in this case Immigration and External (now Foreign) Affairs—can support policy changes for different reasons, at different speeds, and not always in the order that might be expected.

Kenny: the evolution of the battler figure in Howard's Australia

This article explores ways in which the low-budget mockumentary film Kenny (Clayton Jacobson, 2006) evolves the figure of the Australian battler, from its earlier incarnation in The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997). A surprise hit on Australian screens, Kenny is the quietly humorous story of a portaloo worker, one of the ‘ordinary Australians’ that the Howard government claimed it spoke for. But whilst Kenny brought some old-fashioned toilet humour to the box office, he was overworked, underappreciated and apprehensive. The article maps the film from the perspective of its Australian audience, to suggest ways in which this comic but uneasy version of the working-class battler responded to socioeconomic change. It scrutinises the circumstances of the film's Australian reception to examine the legacies of an era in which many people became disengaged from politics, the work/family balance seemed harder than ever, and fear was exploited for political advantage. Such an analysis of the representation of the battler figure suggests that both Kenny and The Castle present an idealisation of the battler figure, but they do so differently in response to their sociocultural milieu.

Forward with Fairness? Industrial Relations under Labor in 2008

The Rudd government was elected in late 2007 after a national election campaign centred squarely on industrial relations. In 2008, with a massive mandate, the government presented key pieces of legislation to the Australian parliament, aimed at moving away from the Howard government's Work Choices and toward implementing the `Forward with Fairness' election policy. The government's substantive industrial relations legislation — the Fair Work Bill — was introduced late in 2008 to widespread, though not universal, approval from trade unionists and, at first, muted acceptance and, later, and in the face of deteriorating economic circumstances, sharper criticism from employer groups.

Business Regulation in Australia: Promises, Realities, Futures

CONTEXT (at 2009). John Howard was Australian Prime Minister from 1996 to 2007. This paper was developed for the John Howard’s Decade conference at the Australian National University, March 2006. It is one of a series of outputs and contributions from my 16 years of research and monitoring of 'laws regulating business', including from standpoints of Australian enterprises in changing global and local social and global contexts. New Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, as Opposition leader, loudly criticised expansion of business rules, calling these ‘sand in the engine of economic growth’. There are signs however, of difficulty grappling with regulation realties. Australian and OECD governments find the promises much easier than action. ABSTRACT (at 2006). As the Opposition Leader in the early 1990s, John Howard argued that to meet challenges of the 21st century 'government has to foster a competitive culture in Australia ... to create and encourage an environment in which enterprise and initiative flourish'. During the 1996 election the Coalition reiterated its 'obligation … to implement policies that will unshackle business from the many regulatory burdens imposed on it'. Australian enterprises, governments and communities traversed three identifiable phases of business regulation review over 15 years to 2006 – Red Tape Reduction, National Competition Policy, Process Streamlining. While Competition Policy reviews achieved structural change, on balance, the regulation climate for business advanced little. As external pressures sharpen, reminiscent of the early 1990s, attention returns to 'regulatory ossification', as part-acknowledged by the Howard Government in convening another Red-tape Taskforce in its tenth year of power (adding to a long string of reviews). Arguably, Australia faces income challenges not yet imagined, with stark competition on resource and regulation fronts. There could be a window to respond with 'new-era' regulation innovation that harnesses Australian societal and economic characteristics. This would require paradigm-shift thinking and critical probing of policy and regulatory practices. A set of principles questioning and reframing core elements of Australian business regulation for a 'new-era' is outlined. Change drivers are also discussed.

A Citation Analysis of Australian Information Systems Researchers: Towards a New ERA?

Citation analysis is a potentially valuable means of assessing the contributions of researchers, in Information Systems (IS) as in other disciplines. In particular, a combination of raw counts and deeper analysis of citation data can deliver insights into the impact of a researcher's publications on other researchers. Despite this potential, the limited literature in the IS discipline has paid very little attention to the use of citation analysis for this purpose. Meanwhile, the federal department responsible for education funding has convinced successive federal governments to develop research quality measures that can be used as a basis for differential funding. The Howard Government's proposed Research Quality Framework (RQF) has been abandoned, but a number of aspects of it survive within the Rudd Government's Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative. The ERA also appears likely to involve a highly formalised process whereby 'research groupings' within individual universities will be evaluated, with (as yet unclear) impacts on the distribution of research funding. Funding agencies have an interest in score-keeping, whether or not their enthusiasm is shared by Australian researchers. It is therefore highly advisable that Australian disciplines, and especially less well-established and powerful disciplines like Information Systems, achieve a clear understanding of their performance as indicated by the available measurement techniques applied to the available data. This paper reports on citation analysis using data from both the longstanding Thomson/ISI collection and the more recently developed Google Scholar service. Few Australian IS researchers have achieved scores of any great significance in the Thomson/ISI collection, whereas the greater depth available in Google Scholar provides a more realistic picture. Quality assessment of the Thomson/ISI collection shows it to be seriously inappropriate for relatively new disciplines generally, and for IS in particular. Yet the Howard Government had selected the Thomson/ISI collection as the data-source for citation analysis for the now-abandoned RQF, and the Rudd Government appears likely to re-select it for the ERA. It is critical to the ongoing accessibility of research funding by Australian IS researchers that steps be taken to ensure that decision-makers are made very well aware of the inadequacies of the ISI data collection, and that alternative, more appropriate processes for impact assessment be developed.

The Evolution of the Temporary Protection Visa Regime in Australia

AbstractWhile the Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) regime was formally introduced in October 1999 by the Howard Government, the concept of temporary protection was not totally alien to the Australian humanitarian landscape. Earlier examples reflected a standard use of temporary protection as a complementary or interim protection mechanism, offering short‐term group‐based protection where individual assessment under the 1951 Convention was both impractical and untimely. This paper focuses on the wider and more controversial changes in the use of temporary protection mechanisms that were to follow with the introduction of the TPV in 1999, which offered substitute protection for individually assessed Convention refugees who had arrived onshore without valid travel documents. It examines the history and evolution of the TPV policy regime from 1999 to the announcement of its abolition in 2008, arguing that the introduction and subsequent development of the policy may be understood as a product of a conservative, exclusionist political climate in Australia, following the unprecedented impact of the populist One Nation party in 1998, and later, the impact of September 11th. It also examines later amendments to the regime as a response to growing domestic disquiet about the impacts of the policy, and the abolition of the TPV policy under a new Australian government elected in late 2007.

Australia's Handling of Tensions between Islam and the West under the Howard Government

This article examines the impact of international conflicts involving the Muslim world upon Australia's multicultural society by studying the Howard government's responses to tensions between Islam and the West since September 11. Specifically, it surveys the Howard government's participation in the ‘War on Terror’, other aspects of Australia's foreign and security policies, including the relationship with the United States, the emergence of immigration and refugee flows as national security issues, and the subsequent impact of all this on multiculturalism and in particular on Australia's Muslim community. At a broader level, the article challenges the argument that foreign policy is inconsequential for social policy, intercommunal, inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations. The internalization of the ‘War on Terror’ has reinforced a negative portrayal of Islam and Muslims in Australia by blurring the dividing line between ‘Islam’ on the one hand and ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism’ on the other. The evidence suggests that government statements and policies, more generally had provoked apprehension amongst a wide cross-section of the Australian Muslim community. A major finding of this article is that unless care is taken, it is not inconceivable that the hitherto harmonious relationship between Muslims and other sections of Australia's community could be unnecessarily endangered.

Pragmatism, Principles and Policy: Federalism and Industrial Relations Regulation in Australia

Traditionally, industrial relations in Australia have been governed by a dual system of federal and State regulation. In recent decades there have been two attempts to create a single national system of industrial relations regulation. In 1973, the Whitlam (Australian Labor Party) government proposed two constitutional alteration referendum questions to give the federal parliament plenary law making powers over `prices' and `incomes', and consequently industrial relations. In 2005, the Howard (Liberal—National parties coalition) government used the existing constitutional law making powers of the federal parliament, the corporations power, to widen the coverage of the federal industrial relations system with the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 (Cth) to capture about 85 percent of Australian employees. This article compares and contrasts these two efforts to create a national industrial relations system. The analysis shows that both efforts illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of federalism generally and suggests the political nature of industrial relations policy in Australia remain regardless of the regulatory jurisdiction.

Australian Workplace Agreements in Universities

This article details the use of Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) in universities after the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements (HEWRRs) mandated that all university staff be offered an AWA by the end of August 2006. It is clear from the evidence that, despite this requirement, at most universities there was little take-up of this form of individual employment arrangement. Of the few who did sign an AWA, one group stood out more than others — senior general staff. However at most universities, these workers have traditionally been employed on individual, common law contracts and moving them from one form of individualized employment arrangement to another did little to increase the overall pool of those on individual employment arrangements in higher education. Once these senior general staff were excluded from the equation, the take-up rate was very low indeed. The research demonstrates that the Howard government's approach to increasing the take-up rate of AWAs in universities failed. With the election of the Rudd Labor Government in November 2007, the very low take-up of AWAs has meant that the university sector has a relatively small task in moving staff back to collective employment arrangements.

Will the Rudd Federal Labor Government Abolish Key Legal Protections for Certain Exploited Vulnerable Workers?

This article examines the potential loss of legal protections for certain outworkers as a result of recently enacted (or foreshadowed) federal legislative provisions. The article begins with an overview of existing legal protections under State and Territory laws for independent contractor outworkers labouring in industries outside the textile clothing and footwear sector - protections which survived the Howard government's federal takeover of labour law. The article then examines how the proposed further centralization of labour law under the Rudd federal Labor government may lead to the abolition of these existing legal protections. In particular, the article focuses upon the threats posed by provisions of the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Act 2008 (Cth) and the Fair Work Bill 2008 (Cth). The article concludes by setting out the necessary steps to avoid the unjust obliteration of key legal protections for these exploited vulnerable workers.

Development in the ‘First World’

The levels of Indigenous disadvantage in Australia are startling compared with those of the rest of the nation. Despite various government initiatives and legal reforms, systemic poverty remains prevalent in Aboriginal communities. In the Northern Territory, this has culminated in the Emergency Intervention initiated by the Howard government in 2007. In this paper, I explore the way in which the dynamic of difference, or the understanding of difference as ‘otherness’ which lies at the heart of colonialism, continues to prevail in Indigenous affairs and underlies the latest efforts of the Australian government in the Northern Territory. I apply this notion of difference as a platform for understanding the arguments for and against the Intervention. I suggest that this emergency has opened a new chapter in the dilemma of how we account for this special case of difference in Australian society.

Trouble in Eden

AbstractIn response to the Wild-Anderson Report, Little Children are Sacred (June 2007) that outlined a pattern of widespread sexual abuse of small children and chronic alcoholism among aboriginals in the Australians' N.T. (Northern Territory), the federal government launched a major Intervention there sending in teams of doctors and health workers to examine all aboriginal children for abuse and special police and army units to stabilise the situation in remote communities. Moving beyond the recommendations contained in the Report the Howard government announced it would use compulsory acquisition powers and appoint administrators over aboriginal townships and centres (about 73 of them) for five years. These officials would be charged with building up local infrastructures and could assign individuals to work for their welfare payments at jobs assigned to them. More disturbing to aboriginal leaders and communities was a government plan to allow individual aboriginals to lease small plots of land on traditional community owned reserves for the purpose, it was said, of owning their home and/or to start a small business. Furthermore, traditional owners would be allowed to enter into long term leases (for 99 years) on their lands in order to attract outside investment and capitol. There was considerable fear among aboriginals that these unilateral moves by the government would undermine the basis of aboriginal culture and lead inevitably to the loss by aboriginal people of real control over their traditional land.