South Wales Parliament Research Articles

Submission to New South Wales Parliament Select Committee Inquiry on the NSW coronial jurisdiction

Submission to New South Wales Parliament Select Committee Inquiry on the NSW coronial jurisdiction

Submission to New South Wales Parliament Select Committee Inquiry on the NSW Coronial Jurisdiction

Submission to New South Wales Parliament Select Committee Inquiry on the NSW Coronial Jurisdiction

Investigating displacement effects as a result of the Sydney, NSW alcohol lockout legislation

Aims: On 30 January 2014, in efforts to reduce alcohol-related violence, the New South Wales Parliament adopted alcohol lockout legislation targeting a geographically defined area: the Sydney entertainment precinct. This study used qualitative methods to explore with stakeholders of two areas (Kings Cross/Potts Point and Newtown) whether there was any evidence of displacement of alcohol-related problems from inside to outside the lockout zone.Methods: Four focus groups were conducted in mid-2015 with residents and patrons: two in Kings Cross/Potts Point (where the measures were implemented) and two in Newtown (an alternative entertainment precinct exempt from the measures). Each explored experiences pre and post lockouts and any perceived changes in the number of people in the area, level of disorderly conduct, patterns of drug and alcohol consumption, public amenity and public safety.Findings: Stakeholders in Kings Cross/Potts Point reported many improvements since the reforms: including reduced patron numbers, less waste and improved public amenity. However, stakeholders from Newtown reported the opposite: increased patron numbers, reduced public amenity and reduced public safety.Conclusions: This provides tentative evidence that even if the Sydney lockouts have reduced alcohol-related violence there may have been a partial displacement of alcohol-related problems to outside the lockout zone.

Ifould, Remington and Metcalfe: three mostly wise men behind the New South Wales Library Act 1939

Three men were the driving force behind the passing of the New South Wales Library Act by the New South Wales Parliament in the early hours of 3 November 1939: John Metcalfe, Geoffrey Cochrane Remington and William Herbert Ifould. This paper explores the ways in which their differences and their similarities melded to make this happen.

Free Vote Patterns in the New South Wales State Parliament

This research note examines patterns of MPs’ voting behaviour during ‘conscience’ or ‘free’ votes on three ‘morality politics’ issues in the lower house of the New South Wales state parliament in Australia: adoption rights for gay couples; scientists’ use of therapeutic cloning; and the status of the Sydney Medically Supervised Injection Centre. First, the research note reviews the literature on conscience voting and hypothesises that party will be the main predictor of voting patterns, but also establishes that previous studies have almost exclusively focused on national legislatures. Next the research note discusses methodological issues. Third, it presents the analysis of free vote patterns in the New South Wales parliament on the three ‘morality politics’ issues, along four key variables: party; sex; social ideology; and religion. The analysis of voting in the New South Wales parliament challenges existing explanations of free voting, where party is the key predictor of voting patterns. Intra-party unity figures show that party membership is a weaker predictor of voting behaviour in the two main political parties in New South Wales than in either the Australian parliament or in overseas parliaments. It is argued that at the subnational level other factors are more important in explanations of free vote patterns.

Parliament on “the Wireless” in Australia

Australia's parliament allowed the radio broadcast of proceedings in 1946, a decade after New Zealand, but well before the “Mother of all Parliaments” in 1978. In keeping with Australia's reputation as a pioneering democracy, early interest in broadcasting parliamentary debates can be traced to the 1920s. In the formative years of “wireless” it was imagined radio might close the gap between parliaments and the public. Proceedings of the New South Wales parliament were actually broadcast for several weeks during 1932 (and before the New Zealand parliament institutionalised this practice). Tasmania experimented with parliamentary broadcasting in 1934. Australia's embrace of parliamentary broadcasting in 1946 was less carefully planned than has been suggested. It was an opportunistic, caucus‐initiated Chifley government measure driven by a long‐held ALP concern about newspaper bias. It was however generally justified as reform to bring the people to their Parliament and, remarkably, did have bipartisan support.

The cost of policital donation reform: a burden on the implied freedom of political communication - unions NSW and others v State of New South Wales

On 8 April 2013 Unions NSW announced that it would challenge the validity of laws made by the New South Wales Parliament in 2012 that only permit political donations from persons who are on the ele...

Adam Smith and Faith in the Transformative Qualities of Wine in Colonial New South Wales

The desire of the governing class of colonial New South Wales to reduce drunkenness among the working classes coincided with the desire to create a wine industry. This intersection occurred in legislation encouraging substitution of light wine for beer and spirits. The notion that encouraging production and consumption of colonial wine could create sobriety arose from faith in the transformative qualities of wine. This faith can be traced from influential philosopher Adam Smith's conviction in Wealth of Nations (1776) that people who lived in proximity to wine regions in France were among the most sober Europeans to the enactment of a policy of substitution in the New South Wales Parliament in the 1860s.

Rainbow Blindness: Same-Sex Partnerships in Post-Coalitional Australia

Rainbow Blindness: Same-Sex Partnerships in Post-Coalitional Australia

The Royal North Shore Hospital inquiry: an analysis of the recommendations and the implications for quality and safety in Australian public hospitals

In October 2007, the New South Wales Parliament appointed a Joint Select Committee to inquire into the quality of patient care at Royal North Shore Hospital (RNSH). The inquiry was initiated in response to the publicity and complaints surrounding a patient who had a miscarriage in the toilets of the RNSH emergency department waiting area. The Committee held four public hearings and received 103 submissions. It handed down 45 recommendations in its report on 20 December 2007. There has been criticism from clinicians and others that the recommendations are too general and will not effect significant change for the severe systemic problems affecting the hospital. This article represents the view of some of the clinicians who work at RNSH, and who gave evidence at the inquiry, on the recommendations and some possible solutions for the health system in general.

Containing Discontent: Anti-Chinese Racism in the Reinvention of Angus Cameron

Angus Cameron is usually remembered as one of the pioneers of labour representation, a carpenter elected to the New South Wales parliament in 1874 who became a leading advocate for legislation to stop Chinese immigration. Historians have seen this link as evidence that racism was pushed from below by the working class. This article shows that Cameron turned to anti-Chinese agitation at the very point he broke with the labour movement, and argues that he most likely did so in the hope of saving his political career. In particular it looks at Cameron's infamous Select Committee Report into Common Lodging-houses, and the crisis in Cameron's parliamentary career that preceded the establishment of the select committee. It also suggests that key members of the Sydney ruling class had an interest in deflecting attention from the appalling condition of rental housing in Sydney, and that Cameron's report relieved some of the pressure on them.

Sex in the Dark: The Brothels Legislation Amendment Act 2007 (NSW)

The Brothels Legislation Amendment Act 2007 (NSW) was passed by the New South Wales Parliament to expedite the closure of ‘disorderly and unlawful brothels’. This article details the enforcement regime introduced by the Act and then considers the reasons for these reforms. The author argues that the reforms are not aimed at tangible, negative impacts, but instead at ‘unlawfulness and disorderliness’. The article concludes by suggesting that rather than the current approach of harsh expulsion and exclusion, the government could better achieve law and order through legalisation and regulation.

News and Notes

News and Notes

The road to profit

PurposeThis paper aims to reflect on the boundaries of corporate responsibility in the outsourcing relationships between chain stores, transport companies and owner‐driver truck operators.Design/methodology/approachFictional prose.FindingsFinds that questions about corporate social responsibility and accountability for driver safety remain unanswered by the 2005 New South Wales Parliament's Stay‐safe Committee's Inquiry into Road Safety Administration in New South Wales.Research limitations/implicationsEncourages further research into the social effects of transport industry accounting practices particularly in terms of exploring links between performance measurement and road safety.Originality/valueA creative reflection on performance measurement and corporate accountability.

'Our Youth Must Be Protected from Drug Abuse': Talking Tobacco Control in the New South Wales Parliament from the 1960s to the Twenty-First Century

on either the well-documented efforts of the tobacco industry to evade restrictions on the advertising and sale of tobacco products, or the factors influencing the development of regulatory policies. We complement these studies from a cultural history perspective by probing parliamentary debates on tobacco control as they have been conducted in the parliament of New South Wales, Australia. Our main insight is that early on, a new discourse about addiction, corporate wrongdoing and consumer society came to dominate the debates, in which tobacco came to be characterised as a drug. This powerful discourse validated tobacco control as a requirement of good government. Surprisingly, it remained in place through shifts in legislative focus and tended to exclude anticontrol arguments based on concepts of liberty and responsibility.

'Our Youth Must Be Protected from Drug Abuse': Talking Tobacco Control in the New South Wales Parliament from the 1960s to the Twenty-First Century

'Our Youth Must Be Protected from Drug Abuse': Talking Tobacco Control in the New South Wales Parliament from the 1960s to the Twenty-First Century

Commonwealth update

In India President Bush makes a nuclear deal with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. After elections in the Solomons Honiara's Chinese business district is burned down. Australia holds a successful 18th Commonwealth Games as the New South Wales parliament becomes the first to abolish allegiance to the Queen. Jamaica chooses its first woman prime minister and the UK its first woman Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary. New Zealand appoints its first Maori head of the armed forces. Nigeria's Senate votes against a third term for the president. Zambia booms as copper prices soar. And a tortoise that belonged to Robert Clive dies in an Indian Zoo aged about 250.

Arthur Rae: A 'Napoleon' in Exile

Arthur Rae (1860-1943) was a New Zealand shearer and labourer who moved to Australia in 1889. The son of a long-serving official in the New Zealand railway's union, he became an organiser and later a prominent leader in the Australian Workers Union (AWU) during the 1890s and into the early years of the twentieth century. In 1891 he began his somewhat sporadic career in Labour politics as one of the first Labour members to be elected to the New South Wales Parliament in 1891. Rae's activism was informed by his deep commitment to late nineteenth socialist ideals and to ameliorating the condition of working people. His commitment to these socialist ideals and his refusal to compromise them were the determining factors in his labour movement career. It eventually cost him his career in, and membership of, his union and relegated him to the periphery of Labour Party politics. Rae's struggle was to find the ways to proselytise his socialist vision for Australian workers despite his marginalisation within mainstream labour institutions. That he was able to do this over a period of almost three decades is a testament to the powerful role individuals can play making labour history.

Imagining Mary Dean

Leon Edel expressed the central puzzle of writing biography as "every life takes its own form and a biographer must find the ideal and unique literary form that will express it" (qtd. in Novarr 165). My primary challenge in writing Poisoned: The Trials of Mary Dean – a biography in the form of a (fictionalised) first-person memoir purportedly written by the subject herself – was the location of a textual voice for Mary that, if not her own, could have credibly belonged to a woman of her time, place and circumstance. 2The 'Dean case' caused a sensation across Australia in the mid-1890s when George Dean was arrested for the attempted murder of his 20-year-old wife, Mary. George was a handsome Sydney ferry master who had played the romantic lead in a series of spectacular rescues, flinging himself into the harbour to save women passengers who had fallen overboard. When on trial for repeatedly poisoning his wife, his actions and motivations were not probed; instead, Mary's character and behaviour and, by extrapolation, those of the entire female sex, were examined and analysed. This approach climaxed in defence counsel claims that Mary poisoned herself to frame her husband, but George was found guilty and sentenced to hang, the mandatory punishment for attempted murder at that time.

Who benefits from the equalising of age of consent provisions?: A critical analysis of the Wood Royal Commission Paedophile Inquiry recommendation for a lower minimum age of consent

When the Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service released its final Report on the Paedophile Inquiry in August 1997, its recommendation to remove the distinction between heterosexual and female homosexual sex and male homosexual sex by lowering the age currently set for the latter category surprised many citizens. There was concern, firstly, about the fact that the lack of satisfactory protective mechanisms in the prevailing laws would escape investigation and, secondly, that acts previously understood to be paedophilia and pederasty would be de-criminalised, thereby increasing the vulnerability of young Australians to sexual predators.The Crimes Amendment (Sexual Offences) Bill, introduced into the New South Wales Parliament in October 1997, and reintroduced in 1999, suggests a firm determination to implement the Royal Commission recommendation on consent, notwithstanding the fact that such change would be implemented in the absence of community debate and without addressing the implications of de-criminalisation. Although the Bill was rejected in the Upper House on both occasions, it is believed that further attempts will be made in the near future and, again, it will be in the absence of broad community debate. It is also widely believed that, should a change of this nature be implemented in New South Wales, it will have implications for children in other states across Australia.This paper explores the implications of equalising at a lower rather than higher minimum age of consent.