Howard Years Research Articles

Refugee Protection in the Howard Years: Obstructing the Right to Seek Asylum

Refugee Protection in the Howard Years: Obstructing the Right to Seek Asylum

Introduction: Australia and International Law during the Howard Years

Introduction: Australia and International Law during the Howard Years

Introduction: Australia and International Law during the Howard Years

Introduction: Australia and International Law during the Howard Years

Australia and East Timor during the Howard Years: An International Law Perspective

Australia and East Timor during the Howard Years: An International Law Perspective

‘Small-fry’: suburban decline and the global outback in recent Asian Australian cinema

In considering three films that I link in this speculation on ‘Asian Australian cinema’, I want to argue that if, before The Finished People (Khoa Do, 2003), Asian Australian stories tended to be marginal and community based, the success of Khoa Do's film (and life) has opened out migrant experience to broader empathy so that now it can be drawn upon to speak for general humanity beyond ‘Australianness’. If The Finished People and Little Fish (Rowan Wood, 2005) belong to a period of film industry decline in Australia, corresponding with a parallel social/cultural depression in Australia—the worst of the Howard years—Lucky Miles (Michael James Rowland, 2007) reworks the trauma of those years, as a new Back of Beyond (John Heyer, 1954)—globalized rather than nationalized, its references less to the subsistence aesthetics and economy of postwar nation-building and more to a globalized commodities export market and the genres of global film-making styles. So we no longer need to have quintessential ‘Australian’ battlers to demonstrate resilience; asylum seekers are now better at doing this and much more appealing than Aussie battlers (like the Heart family in Little Fish, notwithstanding the attempt to rescue them by importing global/local stars to perform their abjection)—all the more so if one of the refugees has come in search of his Australian father. And if the landscape of the original Back of Beyond provided a counterpoint to the economic centrality of suburban Australia as site of commodity consumption in the 1950s, the Pilbara landscape setting of Lucky Miles is above all a key site of commodity production and export in the globalized economy which also draws the characters to export themselves into the flow of this market.

Australian Approaches to International Environmental Law during the Howard Years

Australian Approaches to International Environmental Law during the Howard Years

Australian Skill Shortages: How the Howard Government Did Not Change its Mind

AbstractThis article begins by assessing the evidence that there was, and is, a skill shortage in Australia, and notes that for some years the Howard government initially denied there was a problem of unmet demand for skilled people. It was not until late 2006 that we saw any kind of official acknowledgement of a problem. On 12 October 2006, Prime Minister Howard announced a ‘Skills for the Future’ policy that involved a commitment to spend $837 million over five years, and aimed ‘to help build a more highly skilled and responsive workforce to support Australia’s long-term economic growth’. Acknowledging that policy-making begins with the framing or constitution of a problem, assessments are offered of this federal government’s account of the ‘skill shortage’ problem. The questions posed in this article are: what policy initiatives during the Howard years were designed to address issues of training, and what was their potential for addressing the problem of an apparent shortage of skilled workers in Australia?

Non‐Departmental Public Bodies Under the Howard Governments1

There has been both continuity and change in the use of non‐departmental public bodies (NDPBs) during the Howard years. In terms of continuity, the statutory authority and its incorporated version, the statutory corporation (in whose development late 19th and early 20th century Australian governments played such an important part), have remained in wide use. In terms of change, however, two other NDPB forms offered some challenge to its popularity. The government‐owned company came to be a preferred form for government business enterprises (GBEs) and, more recently, for many other non‐commercial public activities as well. And the executive agency, first making its Australian appearance in 1999, seemed initially to be another significant challenger, but its numbers, never great, were soon cut back. The article examines these trends, relating them to several relevant systemic inquiries and policy changes, notably the Humphry review of the governance of GBEs, the final settlement (in 1997) of the package of financial management acts, the Uhrig inquiry of 2003 and the system‐challenging pressures that have followed it. Commonwealth participation in joint (Commonwealth/subnational and Commonwealth/private) activities is also noted, as is the lack of ‘fit’ of the Australian experience with international theorising about ‘agencification’. Finally, the article seeks to identify the leading figures within the Howard governments who have been directing both the changes and the continuities involved in these developments.

Listen Br'er Sterling: The Critic as Liar [A Pre(r)amble to Essays on Sterling Brown

Can a literary and critical reputation be built on the basis not just of what someone has written but also what s/he has said, on kaleidoscopic traces of the tongue gone pure? Anyone interested in the future of African-American literary and cultural understanding must trust so, as a store of discursive and methodological wisdom remains lodged in the memories, tapes, and inscriptions of Sterling Brown's public presentations, extemporaneous tutorials, and other teacherly rambles. From his telephone booth room at Williams' Berkshire Hall and his Lincoln University digs at The Monastery to the downstairs apartment at Fisk's Spence House and nearby Gillie's Barbershop, and finally at the Kearney St. house of the Howard years and untold lecture halls, libraries, community centers, and street corners in between, Sterling Brown created ritual spaces of vibrant African-American discourse where the boundaries of formal and vernacular expression were crossed and recrossed, the insistent rhythm of talking and listening constituting a vision of black collective consciousness not as system, essence, blueprint, or sentiment, but as dialogue. Sterling Brown's capacity to speak in elegant, extended arcs of dazzling utterance no matter the occasion was legendary, and, everpercipient, he knew his own propensities: Those of you who have to go to lunch may leave now, he once told a rapt Swarthmore College audience, I will still be talking when you return. But one never had the sense with him of being suffocated by lengthy monologue. That is because Sterling's performances were acts of critical ventriloquism, populated by a plethora of voices whose varying tonal markings turned his perorations on art, cultural history, and political economy into a richly variegated commentary on the relation of meaning to style and context. This is true in a way not inconsistent with the purport

Race, Radicalism, and Reform: Selected Papers, Abram L. Harris

This volume presents selections from the work of Abram L. (1899-1963), acknowledged as the first black American economist to achieve prominence in academic life. Between 1927 and 1945 he served on the faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, he was a professor in the College at the University of Chicago. During the Howard years, was a central figure among a remarkable group of black social scientists clustered at that institution. He influenced the thought and work of Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, and Eric Williams. A frequent contributor to professional journals in economics, especially the Journal of Political Economy, Harris was recognized as perhaps the foremost expert on the comparative analysis of alternative approaches in economics. Race, Radicalism, and Reform includes an introduction by the editor that provides a chronology of Harris' life and an assessment of his scholarly contributions. A diverse array of Harris' papers is contained in the volume covering all the major themes he addressed in the course of a lifetime of research: the Negro problem in the United States, the interaction between race and class, controversies in American economic history, Marx and Marxism, the nature and content of institutional economics, and the economics of John Stuart Mill. What results is a comprehensive view of Harris' work, affording insight into important transitions in his thinking about radicalism and social reform. In particular, the book chronicles his movement from a left orientation in his youth to a moderate libertarianism in his later years.