Australasian Political Studies Association Conference 2003
Hosted by the School of Government
University of Tasmania

Timetable Session Eight Abstracts
Wednesday 1 October: 9.00 a.m. - 10.30 a.m.

John Warhurst, Australian National University
The Republic Campaign in Australia: Past, Present, Future

Will Australians get just one chance to vote for a republic? When the then leader of the Australian Republican Movement (ARM), Malcolm Turnbull, reckoned during the 1999 referendum campaign that it might be Australians' one and only chance to vote for an Australian Head of State he was dismissed as a scare monger. Yet by the time of the next federal election five years will have elapsed. It shows just how rare chances for constitutional reform are and just how tough it is to achieve a second chance. But the campaign continues. There are impediments and opportunities. From the perspective of the ARM, the major republican community organisation, its national chair will examine the recent past, reflect on the present state of the campaign, discuss proposals to advance the republic issue and speculate on the likelihood of a second referendum.

Sinclair Davidson, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology - Tim R L Fry, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology - Kelly Jarvis, The University of Melbourne
We Want a Republic, God Save the Queen: An Australian Case Study in Democratic Choice

Abstract: The failure of the Australian “Republic Referendum” in November 1999 highlights some issues that can be described as being paradoxical. Opinion polls indicate that most Australians favor a republic, however, the republicans lost the vote. This paper investigates whether voters employ a loss-minimization rule as opposed to a value-maximization rule when making political decisions. Based on the predictions of each rule, political strategies are devised and compared to the official arguments employed by republicans and monarchists during the period preceding the vote. In addition, empirical work relates voting outcomes at both the electoral division level and the individual voter level to factors that are likely to be correlated with political risk aversion. The results are consistent with the notion that voters do not employ value-maximization rules.

Dominic O’Sullivan, University of Waikato
Philosophical Foundations of Maori-Crown Relations in the Twenty First Century: Biculturalism or Self-Determination

This paper demonstrates that the philosophical premises underlying biculturalism and self-determination lead to different conclusions about where power properly resides with respect to Crown/Maori relations in New Zealand. It is argued that biculturalism is not the panacea for the realisation of legitimate Maori aspirations that has been assumed by both Maori and Pakeha policy elites over the past twenty years because it makes assumptions about power relationships which limit greater degrees of Maori autonomy – one step towards self-determination is permitted, but the next prevented. Biculturalism can not realise greater autonomy because it is concerned primarily with relationships among people in institutional settings and within and among bureaucratic institutions. Therefore it is less likely to meet Maori aspirations than self-determination which is concerned with creating, to the greatest extent possible, independence and autonomy for groups, not necessarily in isolation from wider society, but certainly apart from controls and regulations imposed from outside the would be self-determining community. Self-determination locates power, at least to some extent, within traditional Maori social units, while biculturalism, although assuming a sharing of power, inevitably gives Maori the status of junior partner in a project designed to modify state institutions to make them more responsive to Maori interests. While in itself this is advantageous to Maori, biculturalism is not a substitute for the affirmation of traditional social structures as the central point in a Maori quest for greater independence from an historically intrusive state.

Kate Crowley, University of Tasmania - Brian Coffey , RMIT University
Green Planning and New Governance: Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together

Bridgman and Davis have argued that 'ideally government will have a well developed and widely distributed policy framework, setting out economic, social and environmental objectives'. This paper compares the green planning potential of two recent state policy frameworks Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together, which are both very different exercises in new governance. Whilst both are underpinned by rhetorical concepts of environmental sustainability and triple bottom line planning, neither are overtly committed to green planning nor its practical applications. This paper is significant for considering green planning at the sub-national rather than national level, and for testing the hypothesis that prescriptive notions of green planning and deliberative aspects of new governance are contradictory. It is likely, nevertheless, that best practice new governance will be ecologically sustainable, and that best practice green planning will be democratically deliberative. The paper also examines the requirements for the administrative embedding of new governance and green planning principles, and makes recommendations for the improvement of Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together in terms of achieving environmental sustainability and the triple bottom line.

Giorel Curran, Griffith University
Conceptualising and institutionalising sustainability: ESD views from the departments

There is a growing awareness that the principles of sustainable development (SD), and in Australia ecologically sustainable development (ESD), apply to a broader range of activities and issues than originally conceived. This sentiment is typically expressed as the ‘triple bottom line’ of environmental considerations. Here development activities are assessed in terms of the integrated environmental, economic and social impacts they generate. Australian governments and their public sectors also increasingly acknowledge this broader application and penetration of sustainability principles. Sustainable development is, of course, a very elastic term that is conceptualised, understood and applied in very diverse ways. Because of the breadth and generality of sustainable development, the term is vulnerable to rhetorical appropriation. Nonetheless, environmental considerations are now relatively mainstream, and the political marginalisation of environmental issues often invites electoral backlash. ESD officially entered the Australian environmental policy lexicon in the 1980s with the formation of the ESD working groups. The term was formally translated to the COAG-endorsed National Strategy of Ecologically Sustainable Development in 1992. ESD principles are now incorporated in the new framework environment legislation – the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) 1999 – that mandates commonwealth departments to report on their contributions to ESD. This paper further explores the conceptualisation of ESD by examining the departments’ EPBC mandated reports on environmental matters. Given the limited reporting data provided by some departments – with 2001-2 often the first main reporting period – findings necessarily remain preliminary. There is, nonetheless, enough material to raise some interesting commentary.

Ros Taplin, Macquarie University
Experience with ‘New’ Environmental Policy Instruments: The Greenhouse Challenge and Greenhouse Friendly Programs

In association with international moves to address the impacts of global climate change some governments including those in the EU, the US, Canada and Australia have taken steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions via ‘new’ environmental policy instruments (NEPIs) (e.g. voluntary agreements, emissions trading and eco-labelling). This has been in response to the Framework Convention on Climate Change and in anticipation of the Kyoto Protocol coming into force.

This paper focuses on experience with two particular NEPIs: the Australian Greenhouse Office’s Greenhouse Challenge and Greenhouse Friendly programs. The Greenhouse Challenge program was initiated in 1995 to facilitate voluntary cooperative agreements between industry and government whereby enterprises undertake to abate their greenhouse gas emissions through energy and process efficiency and by enhancing greenhouse sinks. As at May 2003, there were 820 participants in the Greenhouse Challenge. The Greenhouse Friendly program was launched in 2001 and involves promotion and certification of eco-labelling for climate change abatement. Consumer goods and services that have all cradle to grave greenhouse gas emissions offset by corresponding emissions abatement can be certified.

These policy instruments have been implemented notwithstanding that the Howard Government’s current position regarding Kyoto is against ratifying the Protocol. The programs were formulated with regard to the ‘no regrets’ framework set out in the National Greenhouse Strategy and are not intended to compromise business objectives of profitability and growth.

The paper relates empirical evidence on the evolution and effectiveness of these programs to theoretical discussion on the role of NEPIs in industrial transformation, social learning and sustainability. The success or effectiveness of these greenhouse NEPIs appears to be dependent on industry motivations and incentives for participation, the implementing agency’s procedures and the design of the process for collaboration and information sharing between government and industry.

Assoc Prof. Linda Hancock, Deakin University
Margaret Reynolds: Protecting Women’s Rights Universally

Margaret Reynolds is significant to an analysis of cosmopolitanism in view of her diverse involvement in a range of international campaigns directed towards improving respect for human rights in Australia and by Australians overseas. Most recently she has been involved with international lobbying for human rights through the United Nations Association of Australia, and also through non-governmental Commonwealth (oldBE) organizations. After being a community activist for cross-cultural education in north Queensland in the 1960s and 1970s she subsequently became a Senator and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Status of Women (and for Local Government) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In those positions she initiated exchanges between Australian women and women from Southeast Asia in an effort to facilitate gender-equity in Australia’s engagement with East Asia. In particular she was responsible for taking up concerns expressed by Filipino women about sexual violence by Australian tourists (which had been ignored by the Australian embassy in Manila) and facilitating the legislation in 1994 for the prosecution in Australia of alleged perpetrators of such offences overseas (at a time when the Keating government had rescinded support for other international prosecutions concerning war crimes committed during World War 2). She represented Australian NGOs at the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at the UN in New York in April-May 2000, the report back from which features various statements from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She has written a historical book about ALP women’s representatives, The Last Bastion: Labour Women Working Towards Equality in the Parliaments of Australia, (1995) and has recently been involved in coordinating Australian NGO efforts to ensure respect for refugee rights. Her networking with NGOs and Australian human rights and feminist activists on international rights agendas will form part of the presentation.

Geoffrey Stokes, Deakin University
Cosmopolitanism and Australian Political Thought

Cosmopolitanism is a philosophy of life – morality, politics and law – based on universal values. Typically, it advocates rights and responsibilities that transcend the nation state. For the purposes of this paper, cosmopolitan civic ideology may be characterised as global or world citizenship, which is distinguished by its reliance upon ‘unofficial’ political action by non-governmental organisations, social movements and individuals. As a form of transnational citizenship, cosmopolitanism challenges both ethnic and civic nationalism. This paper argues that there exist strong cosmopolitan traditions of Australian political thought. In addition to institutionalist proposals for world federation, cosmopolitanism is evident in the Australian peace, feminist and environmental movements, as well as in groups devoted to promoting human rights and equitable overseas development assistance. Cosmopolitanism in Australia may also be found in the work of a small, but diverse, political elite who can be thought of as ‘organic intellectuals’, or ‘bearers of ideas’. Such intellectuals are not the traditional kind of ‘detached’ scholars; they are engaged activists who interpret, adapt, publicise and promote political ideas that are usually formulated by others. Typically, these cosmopolitans use established universalist concepts and theories to criticise and reform institutions and practices in Australian and outside it. In so doing, they have helped broaden Australian discourses of citizenship and promoted an Australian civic identity that is more transnational in outlook.

Roderic Pitty , Deakin University
Michael Kirby’s ideas of cosmopolitan justice

Few judges have been compared to strikers in the Australian contribution to a just world order, and Justice Kirby is arguably the only one today in the world league, as described by a Western Australian judge with a social conscience upon reviewing a collection of Kirby’s speeches in recent years, published under the title Through the World’s Eye in 2000 (the reviewer was Hal Jackson, in the Alternative Law Journal). Kirby has been a prominent proponent of legal reform for 30 years and, more broadly, an important leader in the difficult process of trying to generate respect for universal human rights in Australia, which he described in an interview with the chairperson of the WA Law Reform Commission in 2000 as a country very belatedly “throwing off the shackles of parochialism”. This paper will critically review Kirby’s endeavours to apply cosmopolitan ideas of fundamental human rights, and his efforts to hasten what, in a review of Rowse’s biography of Nuggett Coombs, he has called “the slow pace of change in the Australian democracy”. Consideration will be given to the early period of Kirby’s influence as head of the Australian Law Reform Commission, but the focus will be on Kirby’s advocacy of the relevance of human rights for Australian law and society since his later conversion to cosmopolitan justice in Bangalore, India, in 1988. The aim of the paper is to elucidate the most relevant ideas of an enlarger committed to equality and justice who may, in the words of a famous South Asian poet, be justly known as one of “those fortunate people … in love with work” (Faiz Ahmed Faiz).

Gary Smith, Deakin University
Herb Feith’s political thinking, activism and impact

Herb Feith’s untimely death in November 2001 in a level crossing accident near his home in Glen Iris Melbourne was felt most deeply in three countries: in Indonesia, in the homes of friends, at Gadja Mada University in Yogyakarta where he taught for many years after retirement from Monash, and widely in intellectual circles; in East Timor where Xanana Gusmao led a small memorial service; and at Monash University where many hundreds of mourners overwhelmed the religious centre.

The paper seeks to map the political thinking and social and political activism in an extraordinary Australian life. Escaping Vienna at the age of 7 with his Jewish parents, Feith in the 1950s made two remarkable early achievements. As Australia’s first ‘volunteer abroad’ in Indonesia, he initiated what was to become Australian Volunteers International. Later from his PhD at Cornell he would write the “great book” on The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia, and establish himself then and thereafter as one of the world’s leading scholars of Indonesia.
During the second half of the 1960s Feith shifted on to a larger intellectual and activist (and spiritual) plane, where he operated until his death. From being a “professional political science person”, Feith expanded his frame to the major issues of global poverty, injustice and peace/war, Western/ “first world” parochialism, with innovative writing on “repressive developmentalist regimes”, on “second generation self determination claims”, on “dove-elite internationalism”. He put hope in a dramatically reformed UN, and, after September 11, saw “Bush and Bushism as more of a problem for the species and the planet than Osama and Osamaism”. In his regional activism, he aimed to generate internationally oriented civil society networks in both Indonesia and Australia around these issues, while at the same time campaigning against repression, especially in East Timor, and West Papua.

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