APSA50: The jubilee conference of the Australasian Political Science Association

Timetable: Session 10
Friday 4 October: 2.00-3.30pm

Session 1    Session 2    Session 3    Session 4    Session 5    Session 6    Session 7    Session 8    Session 9
Wednesday    Thursday    Friday

Bruce Chapman and Linda Botterill, Australian National University
Drought policy in Australia
Since the introduction of a National Drought Policy in 1992, the Commonwealth government has been grappling with the challenge of developing an equitable response to farmers affected by severe drought. Concerns have included the blurring of business and family objectives of the family farm, the need to meet both business and welfare support objectives and the core problem of defining drought. The policy approach has emphasised that drought is a normal part of the farmer's operating environment, to be managed like any other business risk. However, there has also been recognition that rare and severe droughts occur which warrant government support. This paper explores the major policy issues associated with the provision of drought support and canvasses some alternative approaches for further research.

Jennifer Curtin and Dennis Woodward,Politics, School of Political & Social Inquiry, Monash University
Whatever happened to the rural revolt?
In the period prior to the 2001 federal election there had been much speculation that voters in rural and regional Australia would punish the coalition. It appeared that there was considerable disenchantment amongst such voters with both the National Party and the Liberal Party over a range of policies which were seen as having an adverse impact on them. These policies which were subsumed under the labels of 'economic rationalism' or 'competition policy', were seen to have reduced services in non-metropolitan areas, to have reduced supports and subsidies and to have threatened the livelihoods of rural dwellers. This disenchantment was reflected in the support for the One Nation Party in the 1998 federal election and in state elections in Queensland and New South Wales, and in election victories for the ALP at the state level. The formation of Country Labor was expected to capitalise on this disenchantment. Yet, the ALP was not swept to victory in 2001 on the wave of a rural revolt. This paper seeks to explain why the 'rural revolt' failed to materialise. It will be argued that the explanation lies in more than simply the exploitation of fears of terrorism and a swamping by refugees. This is not to say that these issues were not important. Indeed the skilful linking of them as 'border protection' with quarantine threats struck a responsive chord and the anti-refugee stance undercut key support for One Nation. Strategically targeted spending initiatives, however, should not be overlooked in mollifying rural disquiet. It will be argued that the coalition reacted to the threatened rural revolt with measures (both substantive and symbolic) which enabled it to meet the challenge when coupled to broader 'security' issues.

Virginia Watson, Government and International Relations, University of Sydney
Liberalism and governance in Indigenous affairs
This paper examines the shift from liberal to neo-liberal rationalities of governance in Indigenous Affairs. The reforming tradition in liberal political thought on the question of Indigenous rights and interests has, from the 1970s until recently, informed the development of policies and practices of self-determination through the incitation of collective agency and choice. Land rights, community control of economic, social and cultural resources were central to this conception of a self-determining Indigenous polity. Today, however, it might be said that a specifically neo-liberal (or 'advanced liberal') political rationality is on the ascendancy in Indigenous affairs. Indigenous communities, councils and associations are then redefined as aggregates of individuals whose agency and choices are market-driven. The paper will critically assess the ways these two modalities of liberal political rationality relate to each other, and explore the possibility that neo- or 'advanced' liberal conceptions of 'choice' and agency might in fact be reproducing the older forms of political practice intent on assimilating Indigenous people to a dominant non-Indigenous culture and polity.

Bruce Tranter, School of Sociology, University of Tasmania
Mark Western, School of Social Sciences, University of Queensland
Postmaterialism and age: An Australian anomoly
Inglehart's thesis of value change is one of the most widely discussed accounts of social and political change in advanced Western nations. This research offers a critique of Inglehart's thesis and a clarification of the Australian case. While other critics have attacked the validity of Inglehart's postmaterialism measures, we use Inglehart's own values index to show that even if - as Inglehart claims - his measures are valid, the age/values predictions do not hold as the theory suggests in Australia. In a recent article, Inglehart and Abramson (1999:673) cite Australia among a group of '28 high-income' countries that exhibit 'stronger relationships between values and age' than found in the United States of America. We dispute Inglehart's and Abramson's findings in relation to Australia. We show that the age/values relationship in Australia, like the USA, is very weak, and highlight the problematic nature of assuming a linear relationship between age and values without evidence. We also uncover a new nonlinear relationship between values and age in Australia. This 'Australian pattern' has implications for the study of values research internationally, as similar patterns occur in several other advanced industrial nations.

Rights and global society
Chair: Chris Reus-Smit

Paul Keal
Can international society be redeemed? Indigenous rights and the politics of mutual recognition
This paper argues that the legitimacy of international society is compromised by unresolved claims to indigenous rights within the states that are its constituents. Self-determination is the most fundamental of indigenous rights but conflicts with the meaning ascribed to it in the norms of international society. For international society to attain legitimacy in relation to indigenous rights it needs to consciously promote a normative order that supports indigenous self-determination within the constitutional structures of its constituent states. For this to happen international society needs to be constitute by states seeking constitutional arrangements based on an ongoing politics of mutual recognition founded on genuine inter-cultural dialogue.

Nicky George, Australian National University
Understanding the relationship between rights, needs and obligations: Women's civil society organisations in Fiji
This paper will examine the strategies employed by women's rights activists in Fiji in relation to the issue of violence against women. At the same time it will also outline the social, political and economic context in which these organisations operate. I will draw upon evidence from the Fijian case to support my proposition that focusing upon the idea of human rights as an atomised series of ideas (i.e. generations of rights) rather than human rights as a "total package" that should be considered in connection with issues of material, physical and emotional need has a distorting affect upon the way in which solutions to rights violations are framed. I will demonstrate that a tendency to place the individual actor at the center of the human rights debate under-estimates the extent to which an interplay of structural forces can routinely contribute to a situation where the individual's human rights are ignored or deliberately undermined. At the same time I will also highlight the fact that this situation also impinges upon the individual's ability to access proposed solutions to rights violations.

Michelle Burgis, Australian National University
A law for all peoples? Reconciling Rawls's 'realistic utopia' with global poverty and Islamic worldview(s)
Despite already substantial critique and engagement with the ideas expounded by Rawls in The Law of Peoples (LP), more scholarship is still necessary. In this article, I explore two areas in particular to demonstrate that LP is a very useful contribution to international ethics, but one that needs substantial reworking and deeper consideration. In the first part of the article, a detailed analysis of the changes in Rawls's thought is provided with a consideration of his ideas found in both Theory of Justice (TJ) as well as LP. LP marks a clear shift away from Rawls's earlier universalism in the way that he is willing to accommodate non-liberal, but 'decent' societies. Unlike in TJ, there is no guarantee of a rich set of human rights and Rawls also refuses to apply the difference principle globally, despite the plethora of academic writing on this topic and significant disparities in wealth today. More importantly than economics, however, is the way that Rawls sacrifices some fundamental safeguards relating to rights and liberty so as to tolerate non-liberal societies. The example given by Rawls is the fictional Muslim society of Kazanistan, which is arguably the most utopian aspect of LP. The article spends a good deal of time surveying Islamic political thought and recent state practice to demonstrate that the faith that Rawls has in decent societies is not enough. It is essential also to implement a thicker conception of rights as well as obligations so that current Muslim state practice need not be replicated in Rawls's realistically utopian model.

Robert White and Jed Donoghue
Marshall, Mannheim and modern citizenship
In this paper we address a little-studied tension in Marshall's account of the successive emergence of civil, political and social rights in citizenship as 'a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community.' Although Marshall noted that conflicting principles in citizenship arose 'from the very roots of our social order,' he did not elaborate the point in this first tripartite model. When he returned to it by emphasising strains between democratic, welfare and capitalist moments that were co-present in the 'hyphenated society' rather than successive, he did so in a pessimistic tone at odds with the progressive modernism of his first schema. To blend the two models we read Marshall through Karl Mannheim's early studies of political knowledge. Here Mannheim had anticipated the shift from stages to co-presence, and had prefigured a resolution of Marshall's sense of impasse. In his account of liberal, socialist and conservative 'thought-styles' - the ways of seeing and knowing that are characteristic of particular ways of life - he saw political change as an interactive effect of individually calculating, dialectically collective and culturally symbolic forms of rationality. Since this approach has a classical heritage in keeping with Marshall's neo-Aristotelian sense of citizenship it can be usefully applied to the tensions in his work. In effect, that is, we invent a collegial interaction between Marshall and Mannheim that does not seem to have occurred when the two writers actually were colleagues at the LSE in the 1930s and 1940s. This invention has dual benefits. Mannheim's work can restore the interrupted dynamism of Marshall's, while Marshall's Fabian pragmatism can limit Mannheim's later and hubristic claims for politically engaged intellectuals.

John Cash, Ashworth Program in Social Theory, HPS Department, University of Melbourne
Politics, history and the unconscious
Where psychoanalysis and history join hands in the re-construction of an individual life, or in the exploration of a group experience, the best practitioners of the art address the contingent effects of social and political process (and specific, often traumatic, events), by analysing the ways in which such processes and events mark themselves upon and are registered by the subject. Despite its many strengths, there is a limit to such a method. This limit is approached as analytic attention shifts from the study of an individual or a specific grouping with a common and, for the moment, shared identity, towards the analysis of larger groupings, more complex institutions and whole societies. At some point along this continuum it becomes necessary to pull back from an immersion in the imaginary identifications and symbolic anchorings of an individual or group and attempt to more systematically theorise social processes and their blind impress upon subjects. This is where the difficulties begin; it is in executing this move that a flattening out of experience, memory and fantasy is typically produced. This occurs because most political science, sociology and social theory has appropriated psychoanalysis as a theory of socialisation. In turn, this psychoanalytically-inflected socialisation theory has cast a long, dark shadow upon a multitude of empirical studies that turn to psychoanalysis for a better conceptualisation of subjectivity. This paper explores this major theoretical blindspot, through a discussion of work by Fromm, Adorno, Goldhagen, Althusser and Zizek. It briefly proposes an alternative approach.

Stuart Dawson, School of Historical Studies, Monash University
Dialogical hermeneutics and political inquiry
Dialogical hermeneutics is a recognised, yet still relatively unknown, research method that has been used primarily in anthropological and religious studies. It comprises a group interview or interviews with members of a defined community, the subsequent formulation of understandings by the interviewer, and the restatement of these understandings to the target community to enable refinement and a deeper understanding. In essence, it is a focus group with individual follow up. The technique was championed in anthropology by Barry Michrina and Cherylanne Richards (Person to Person: Fieldwork, Dialogue, and the Hermeneutic Method, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996). Drawing on previous work, the authors wrote this practitioner text as a guide to ethnographic field research. Yet its uses are by no means limited to comparative anthropological studies. It can be applied to the study of any recognisable form of community or organisation as defined by regular and organised membership. I see value in adopting the technique to explore the nature, construction and coherence of values among members of recognisable political subcultures, networks or groups that comprise communities constructed from a set of shared ideals. Dialogical hermeneutics provides a method of accommodating and realistically representing the plurality of perspectives that could be expected to appear in a situation where the shared consciousness of a community has been self-constructed. This presentation will explain the background of dialogical hermeneutics in more detail, and explain how the technique applies to my present research.

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