Journal articles on the topic 'Commonwealth Government administration'

The last few years have seen a range of important changes to the Commonwealth legislation governing offshore petroleum resources. Not the least of these has been the passing of the new Offshore Petroleum Act 2006 (OPA), which will replace the Petroleum (Submerged Lands) Act 1967 (PSLA), and the recent ratification of the Treaty on Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea (CMATS) and the Greater Sunrise International Unitisation Agreement.The PSLA has been the primary legislation for the administration of Australia’s offshore petroleum resources for close to 40 years and, through age and many amendments, it has become complex and unwieldy. The Government saw the need to rewrite the Act to provide a more user-friendly enactment that would reduce compliance costs for governments and industry. The rewrite, passed as the Offshore Petroleum Act 2006, focussed on restructuring the Act, deleting outdated text, rewriting specific sections and generally improving its readability rather than rewriting the entire Act in plain English or changing present regulatory arrangements.The OPA was passed through the Commonwealth Parliament in 2006 and has been passed as mirror legislation to cover offshore waters by the majority of States and the Northern Territory. It will be proclaimed to cover Commonwealth waters once it has been mirrored by the States. The Australian Government will continue to press the remaining States to enact the OPA and it is hoped this process can be finalised later this year.Another major step forward has been the setting up of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority (NOPSA). NOPSA is the centralised Australian Government statutory authority responsible for the administration and enforcement of occupational health and safety legislation in the offshore petroleum industry. It has this role for offshore petroleum activities both in Commonwealth waters and in State and Northern Territory offshore waters. The Safety Authority commenced its regulatory operations on 1 January 2005. It has its headquarters in Perth and an office in Melbourne.

Australian universities have established specific Masters programs for public servants over the past twenty years. However, until recently, despite being established, they have not thrived by comparison with MBA and other masters courses in business. It was not easy to attract students and good staff. MPA programs have generally not captured the public sector community’s attention in the same way as is the case in a number of US schools of public administration or management. This situation changed in 2003 with the creation of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG). This is a consortium of five governments - the Commonwealth government, the New Zealand government, and the three largest state governments - and nine universities set up to provide an Executive Masters in Public Administration. The ANZSOG cohort is composed of future leaders in the opinion of their governments. All students are fully funded by their governments and at a level that is more costly per student than other training. Funding of this scale reflects a major change for governments in Australia.The establishment of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government represents a major change in education of public managers in Australia. There are lessons for other countries in its establishment.

Purpose This paper aims to describe a qualitative research project that investigated factors leading to the very low use of the Australian Commonwealth Government’s indigenous business exemption (IBE), particularly from 2011 to 2015. Design/methodology/approach The project involved interviews with 12 selected stakeholders from Indigenous firms, procuring agencies and policy designers, which took place in 2016. Findings Analysis of the interviews suggested that poor use of the IBE was primarily attributed to risk aversion inside government and limited communication of the existence of the policy outside government. Originality/value A range of other factors and methods of overcoming these problems are also identified; principal amongst these is the need for procuring agencies to engage with Indigenous suppliers in a coordinated and deliberate fashion.

AbstractResearch concerning the history of government and administration should be based not only on historical documents (like legal acts) but also narrative or literary sources such as chronicles. These texts contain large amounts of information about old forms of administration. A good example of that kind of narrative source is the description of European Sarmatia written by Alessandro Guagnini. The author of this text was Italian, who lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the turn of sixteenth and seventeenth century. This text was a historical and geographical relation about the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its neighbours. It was reprinted in different editions and in few languages having a considerable impact on a perception of abovementioned state and even Central and Eastern Europe as well.In modern times Guagnini’s works have been quite forgotten, nevertheless its renewed analysis leads to interesting information at various levels. One of them is presentation of government model in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The described state consisted of few great regions each of which had its own administrative division, history and customs. Together they merged into a great political entity ruled by one monarch and approaching unification.The purpose of this article is to present administrative division in the pages of the described chronicle and how that division was ideologically legitimated by appealing to ancient Sarmatia.

In 1809, in the territories of the Austrian Partition, which had been taken away from Austrians by Polish soldiers, the Central Provisional Military Government of Galicia was formed. The duties of the Governement was the reorganization of administration in Galicia and organization of military troops. The President of the Government was Stanisław Kostka Zamoyski, the most popular and richest magnate in Galicia. Representatives of the local nobility were appointed to other positions in the Government and in the poviat administration bodies. Archive materials allowed the tracing of 53 members. They were born between 1740 and 1780, most often from rich landed gentry and nobility. They owned estates in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Their career path was typical of the social state they represented. Educated, most often in the spirit of the Enlightenment, they took their first steps in public service as administrative officials or military personnel. Some of these careers seemed to have been above average, but the fall of the country in 1795 led to their their interruption. Withdrawing from public life, they returned in 1809. This article, an attempt to form a characteristic of this group, is part of the research on the elite of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the turn of the 19th century.

Performance budgeting initiatives are often partly justified as improving accountability to the legislature. However, it is not always clear whether this is the case. In this article we describe and explain the effects of performance budgeting on the role of the legislature in the budget process. We compare performance budgeting initiatives in the Australian Commonwealth government, the central government of the Netherlands, the Swedish central government and the Canadian federal government. The conclusion of this study is that the performance budgeting initiatives that we studied have a dominant focus on changing the budget structure, but do not seem very successful in altering the budget functions.

ABSTRACTDrawing on data for 60 Australian Commonwealth government bureaucracies 1976–86, this paper explores what measurable consequences for bureaucratic structure can be associated with staffing and spending cutbacks. It looks at cutbacks both at government-wide and at individual-bureaucracylevel, on the basis of a casualty list intended to portray the different dimensions of relative bureaucratic ‘suffering’ more systematically than has hitherto been done in the cutback management literature. It then explores associations between measures of cutbacks and indicators of structural consequences, both at government-wide and departmental level, relating that to the debate as to whether ‘leaner means weaker’ in government cutbacks. The ‘leaner means weaker’ view of bureaucratic cutbacks is hard to sustain from these data.

Onshore gas development projects are often referred for assessment under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), administered by the Commonwealth Department of the Environment and Energy (DOEE), and coal seam gas projects may require additional assessment under the ‘water trigger’ legislation. Queensland Government approval is also required and both governments’ approval processes can intersect. The two processes may have different scope and timeframes, and these are important considerations for proponents bringing forward new gas supply and project expansions. As co-regulators, the Queensland Government and DOEE routinely look for opportunities to better align regulatory practices and ensure they remain contemporary and fit for purpose. In this context, they are exploring opportunities to improve the administration of requirements for Queensland gas projects to enhance the ability of regulators to assess project approvals, ensure compliance, improve process efficiency, and maintain high environmental standards.

Kazakhstan declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and joined the Commonwealth of Independent States. Since then it has witnessed a remarkable economic transformation under the leadership of President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Pursuing a policy of `economy first and then politics', Kazakhstan is under growing pressure to engage in political reforms which include a modernization agenda to improve public service provision. Recent constitutional reforms have received a lukewarm reaction from the international community that Kazakhstan is keen to become part of. At the same time a progressive agenda of public services reform is well under way rooted in new public management and a desire to become much more customer focussed in their orientation. This article examines the parallel themes of political reforms and public services modernization in Kazakhstan. Points for practitioners This article offers two key points for practitioners. First, it describes the detail of public sector reforms taking place in a developing country which secured its independence approximately 16 years ago, and the significant progress since then. Second, it poses questions about the political context in which administrative reform can take place. Has the existence of a highly centralized and autocratic form of presidential leadership resulted in a top-down imperative which has helped the pace of public services modernization in Kazakhstan?

From the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 through the New Deal, American legislators commonly endowed administrative agencies with broad discretionary power. They did so over the objections of an intellectual founder of the American administrative state. The American-born, German-educated lawyer and political scientist Ernst Freund developed an Americanized version of the Rechtsstaat—a government bound by fixed and definite rules—in an impressive body of scholarship between 1894 and 1915. In 1920 he eagerly took up an offer from the Commonwealth Fund to finance a comprehensive study of administration in the United States. Here was his chance to show that a Continental version of the Rule of Law had come to America. Unfortunately for Freund, the Commonwealth Fund yoked him to the Austrian-born, American-educated Felix Frankfurter, a celebrant of the enlightened discretion of administrators. Freund's major publication for the Commonwealth Fund, Administrative Powers over Persons and Property (1928), made little impression on scholars of administrative law, who took their lead from Frankfurter. Today the Rechtsstaat is largely the beau ideal of libertarian critics of the New Deal; few recognize that it is also part of the diverse legacy of Progressive reform.

This essay examines the cultural dimensions of state administrative formation. Revisiting the organization of early U.S. state school administrations in the decades before the Civil War, I emphasize the culturally peculiar vocabularies of universal salvation and motherly care in which early administrators outlined an apparatus of state “designed, like the common blessings of heaven, to encompass all.” Self-consciously distinguishing themselves from a republican governing tradition that depended upon localities to administrate state policy, the Unitarian Horace Mann and his liberal Protestant allies imagined a unified state “like a mother … taking care of all its children.” Drawing from a cultural preoccupation with a motherly and infinitely forgiving God, these Massachusetts state administrators articulated a vision of a department of state government that would directly recognize all persons, and all schools, “within every part of the Commonwealth.” Such words were more than metaphor, though metaphor was crucial to the project. Rather, the organizational logic of the “motherly state” unfolded in the matrices of responsibility and communication, of surveillance and discipline and labor policy that constituted the foundational systems of early comprehensive state administration. By bringing together the insights of institutional development with the methods of cultural history, this essay ultimately suggests that government itself can be understood as a cultural artifact.

The public administration principles characteristic of many Commonwealth countries served as the foundations for building the Hong Kong civil service. These have continued to operate in line with the `one country two systems' concept under which Hong Kong has been administered, since 1997, as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China. Career employment, hierarchy and public service values combined to provide an overarching unity to a system that nevertheless has developed considerable differentiation over time. This article examines the developments that are currently modifying Hong Kong's public sector. The discussion draws on documentary sources and a recently completed qualitative study on the experiences and perspectives of senior Hong Kong managers working in a dozen government departments and agencies. The discussion addresses questions about whether greater differentiation across government departments, in combination with increasing differential within these organizations, will ultimately bring about the demise of the traditional civil service system.

A Change Of Government In Britain Does Not Necessarily Imply a change in foreign policy, but when Robin Cook entered the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in May 1997 it was with the ambition of bringing about a break with the past. The FCO was endowed for the first time with a ‘Mission Statement’, in which spreading the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy (‘mutual respect’) was described as a benefit to be secured through foreign policy; the new Foreign Secretary elaborated this ambition at the launch of the Mission Statement, asserting: The Labour Government does not accept that political values can be left behind when we check in our passports to travel on diplomatic business. Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves. We will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy.

Postwar Canadian approaches to Asia were often in the non-governmental realm, drawing on the country’s missionary heritage. While diplomats in Ottawa worked for pro-Western states in the political realm, Canadian policies on economic development also aimed at building new states in the Canadian image. Canadians in government, transnational and non-governmental positions offered their own country as a model The international experts called together by the UN Technical Assistance Administration were central to Canadian postwar hopes and aspirations. The Administration, headed by Canadian civil servant Hugh Keenleyside, also included staff member George Cadbury, previously director of the Saskatchewan CCF government’s Economic Planning Board. It was individual Canadian technical advisers like these who offered the hands-on advice and played the crucial role in shaping policy taken by Southeast Asian states. These “modern missionaries” imagined themselves as part of a transnational community, one in which Canada could play a leadership role by being an active member of multilateral organizations. This paper examines the experience and role of postwar Canadian technical advisers in Southeast Asia, drawing on selected cases from the 1950s and 1960s. After considering the influence of the Canadian Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) on the idea of planning, it looks at F.R. Scott, the Montreal law professor and poet who served as the first UN Technical Assistance Resident Representative in Burma; Benjamin Higgins, the McGill economist who served as first financial advisor for the Indonesian National Planning Bureau; and J.T. Cawley, the Saskatchewan deputy minister of natural resources who was chief petroleum advisor to the Indonesian government.

This paper provides a brief overview of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (the Act) and discusses the operational performance of the Act in the first 18 months.The introduction of the Act on 16 July 2000 has created a new environmental assessment and approval regime at the Commonwealth level. Proposals are no longer referred for assessment on the basis of government decisions, but on the basis of the potential for a proposal to impact upon a matter of National Environmental Significance (NES). An analysis of projects that have been referred, assessed and approved provides a useful guide to the types of activities, and the circumstances under which proposals are captured by the Act. This exercise is particularly valuable for the oil and gas sector.With a significant proportion of referrals received being generated by the petroleum industry, many issues with the administration of the Act have been identified. Environment Australia has undertaken a number of initiatives to address these concerns. Examples include involvement in the Strategic Assessment being conducted by the Department of Industry Tourism and Resources (DITR), a review of the Referral form and an undertaking to provide a more industry-specific form, and regular, high level meetings between Environment Australia, the DITR and APPEA to facilitate and streamline the working arrangements between parties.The paper also identifies areas where industry can work closely with the Commonwealth Government in new ways to achieve a balance between environmental protection and the continued development of the oil and gas industry.

THE LAW AND THE COURTS IN LITHUANIA IN 1812 IN THE LIGHT OF THE OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE ACTIVITIES OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF LITHUANIASummaryAt the very beginning of his Russian campaign of 1812 Napoleon created a somewhat complicated structure for the new administration of Lithuania. A key element in it was the Commission of the Provisional Government of Lithuania, a surrogate Lithuanian government. Virgilijus Pugačiauskas has recently published the Commission’s official journal, Dziennik czynności Komisji Tymczasowego Rządu Litwy, for the period from 2 July 1812 to 30 July 1813 from the manuscript. In the light of this invaluable resource, we can see the Commission’s efforts to build a new administration and revenue services, create a Lithuanian army, and ensure supplies for Napoleon’s forces. One of the important tasks undertaken by the Commission was to restore the judiciary, which had been disorganised by the war, and to ensure the normal administration of justice and the restoration of full power to the Statute of Lithuania, which had been in use under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and had already been partially supplanted by Russian law following the Partitions of Poland-Lithuania. An act which was of fundamental importance in this respect was the institution of a set of regulations for the judiciary Prawidła dla sądownictwa, adopted by the Commission on 29 July, 1812. Under this act the courts were temporarily to resume their activities only in criminal cases, on the grounds of Lithuanian law and using Polish as the official language. The Commission reserved the right to approve death sentences and – as may be seen from the minutes – actually used this power. The contents of the protocols indicate that the courts actually resumed operations in early August 1812. In October 1812 the Commission adopted a measure on the new organisation of the Vilnius municipal courts.

Following Papua New Guinea (PNG) Independence in 1975, the new administration approached Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) directly concerning the need to address issues related to food security and village-based agriculture. A subsequent series of collaborative research projects between CSIRO and PNG government departments built upon the existing survey information to provide PNG with one of the earliest national-level, computer-based resource information systems, with widespread applications, particularly in agriculture, forestry, environmental management and planning. Part 1 of this historical review discussed the evolution, conduct and outcomes of the CSIRO integrated surveys over the period 1950–75, while Part 2 describes the subsequent research projects that arose from the surveys and concluded in 2000. In addition, the legacy of CSIRO involvement in land research in PNG is examined in relation to advances made both within individual scientific disciplines and in other relevant technological fields, and to operational challenges and structural change within the organisation.

The Australian Government’s 2018 offshore petroleum exploration acreage release was announced by the Commonwealth Minister for Resources and Northern Australia, Senator the Hon Matthew Canavan at the 2018 APPEA conference. This paper provides insights into the processes that the Australian Government has undertaken to select the final release areas and goes into detail on the ongoing petroleum related activities of the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science (the Department). The annual acreage release is a central component of ensuring ongoing, sustainable and responsible investment in Australia’s offshore petroleum sector. The annual acreage release remains the primary mechanism for securing investment in offshore oil and gas exploration in areas of known petroleum potential and new geological frontiers. Continued exploration for oil and gas in Commonwealth waters is a central component of ensuring Australia’s future energy security. Australia’s well established and independent environmental regulator, NOPSEMA (the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority), ensures all petroleum activities in Commonwealth waters are performed safely and in an environmentally responsible manner. Combined with NOPTA’s (National Offshore Petroleum Titles Administrator) leading practice titles administration, Australia remains an attractive investment destination while offering industry leading environmental protections and ensuring safe working conditions industry-wide. Australia offers investors access to data, secure tenure, a stable economic environment and a well-established transparent regulatory system for offshore petroleum activities. A key driver for sustainable activity in Australia is the acceptance of multiple use access to Australia’s marine resources. Recognising this, the department consults with a range of stakeholders on the areas it proposes to release for petroleum exploration. This consultation process provides an opportunity for all interested parties to provide comments and feedback on the areas proposed and in particular highlight how interested parties or the areas might be impacted by exploration activities. The 21 areas in the 2018 offshore petroleum exploration acreage release are located in the offshore areas of Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and the Ashmore-Cartier Islands. These areas will enable the next wave of investment in the Australian resources sector, and the prospect of new oil, gas and condensate production.

Purpose The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is a new program for the provision of support to people with disabilities in Australia. The purpose of this paper is to explore the early implementation experience of this scheme, with a particular focus on the implications of this scheme for issues of care integration. Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 policymakers in the Commonwealth government charged with the design and implementation of the NDIS. Findings The authors find somewhat of a lack of clarity concerning the boundaries of the NDIS and how it will work with a range of different services in the provision of seamless and consumer-directed care. Many of the same kinds of debates about interfaces with services were detected in this study as have been highlighted in relation to UK individual funding schemes. If the NDIS is truly to support individuals with disabilities to achieve choice and control, important work will need to be undertaken in to overcome organizational and institutional boundaries. Originality/value There is little empirical data relating to the implementation of the NDIS to date. This is the first study to explore boundary issues in relation to care integration.

The UK political system has long exemplified ‘majoritarian’ or ‘Westminster’ government, a type subsequently exported to many Commonwealth countries. The primary advantage of this system, proponents since Bagehot have argued, lie in its ability to combine accountability with effective governance. Yet under the Blair administration, this system has undergone a series of major constitutional reforms, perhaps producing the twilight of the pure Westminster model. After conceptualizing the process of constitutional reform, this paper discusses two important claims made by those who favor retaining the current electoral system for Westminster, namely that single-member districts promote strong voter-member linkages and generate greater satisfaction with the political system. Evidence testing these claims is examined from comparative data covering 19 nations, drawing on the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. The study finds that member-voter linkages are stronger in single member than in pure multimember districts, but that combined districts such as MMP preserve these virtues. Concerning claims of greater public satisfaction under majoritarian systems, the study establishes some support for this contention, although the evidence remains limited. The conclusion considers the implications of the findings for debates about electoral reform and for the future of the Westminster political system.

The article contains a historical and legal analysis of proclamations as a cumulative source of Hetmanate’s city law of the second half of 17th – 18th centuries, and their characteristic by origin and purpose. It was established that Hetmanate (a state official name was – Zaporizhian Host) was under the rule of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during this period with all the lands and cities, and then as a part of the Russian monarchy. It is studied that in the field of municipal government, public relations in Ukrainian cities were governed by the norms of urban law, including the provisions of local proclamations (locations) of the autonomous government ofHetmanate, which should be divided into separate specific groups. The most significant of them were those that confirmed the granting of the right to self-government of the Magdeburg sample to Ukrainian cities. The proclamations of Ukrainian hetmans of a defensive, prohibited or protective nature, which were granted to the cities of Hetmanate since the reign of B. Khmelnytskyi and including K. Rozumovskyi, protected the rights of urban communities from abuse bythe local administration and representatives of other classes. The cities were given the right to leave a significant part of the income to the city government bodies and burghers by Hetman permitting proclamations. The electoral proclamations of hetmans to certain individuals controlled the order of elections in cities and prevented abuse duringtheir conduct. The regulation proclamations, issued to the cities by hetmans and colonels, clarified the social and economic power ofmagistrates or town halls and established the economic relations of the urban inhabitants. A separate group of local proclamations consisted of those relating to the proper economic activity of urban craft workshops anddefended the social rights of burghers-artisans. It is proved that the norms of proclamations of all groups provided legal regulationof social relations in the sphere of municipal government of Left-Bank Ukraine primarily till the first city reform in Ukrainian citiesconducted by Russian Empire and the introduction of the Charter to Cities of 1785.

Current arguments in Australia concerning horizontal fiscal equalisation may help inform the debate in the United Kingdom concerning possible changes to the Barnett formula and the establishment of financial relations with any regional governments in England. Although Australia is a long-established federation, with mature institutions for managing the financial aspects of intergovernmental relations, the most populous states are now pushing for a per-capita-based system to replace the existing formula—based on needs and costs—overseen by the independent Commonwealth Grants Commission. This has important implications for the United Kingdom, where the Barnett formula—a per capita system for deciding annual changes in the funding for the devolved administrations—has been increasingly challenged. In particular, the Barnett system has been vulnerable to nontransparent ‘formula-bypass’ agreements. We argue that the status quo in the United Kingdom appears secure as long as England remains a single entity and the UK Treasury sees the financial implications of larger per capita expenditure in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland as relatively small. However, we speculate that regionalisation of government in England would be likely to increase the pressure: to abandon the Barnett system; to look more systematically at need and cost, rather than population, as criteria for allocating funds between governments; and to move towards an Australian-type system. However, the recent experience of Australia also shows that larger states prefer a per-capita-based system allied to more political, less transparent, arrangements to deal with ‘special circumstances’. It may be that a Barnett-type formula would suit the new ‘dominant states’ in a fully federalised United Kingdom which would, ironically, create an alliance of interests between Scotland and London.

In this, the last of three papers devoted to urban restructuring and its impact upon the built environment of an Australian city, the spatial focus narrows from the metropolitan region to an inner zone of Adelaide. This is the part of Adelaide that has gained most from the processes of residential reinvestment and gentrification over the last two decades. The interest in the circulation of capital that has been maintained throughout the previous papers is explored more fully by measuring and evaluating investment activity in the renovation and redevelopment submarkets. The evidence presented on the organizational structure, levels of investment, and returns to investment within the two submarkets makes for a better-informed characterization of ‘property capital’. It also serves to make the accompanying role of public finance in the revitalization process much clearer. In this paper, the interpretation of capital formation in the renovation and redevelopment submarkets suggests that all three tiers of government in Australia have been thoroughly implicated in the residential transformation of Inner Adelaide during the last two decades. Changes to the Commonwealth States Housing Agreement in 1973 released public funds for rehabilitating terrace housing in the City and inner suburbs, and the Hawke Government restructured taxation policy and the financial markets affecting investment in the home unit and town house submarket in the 1980s. Meanwhile the Dunstan administration in South Australia axed the freeway and high-rise-housing plans of the previous state government, and pressured City Hall to abandon its grandiose plans for commercializing the City's ‘square mile’. The residential development policies conceived in the mid-1970s as part of the replacement City of Adelaide Plan were emulated by other local government bodies in the nearby suburbs. Somewhat uncharacteristically, the state's public-housing agency gave a lead to project developers in the private sector by demonstrating what could be achieved in the submarket of inner-city-home units and town houses.

Good governance requires the accommodation of multiple interests in the cause of decision-making. However, undue regard for particular sectional interests can take its toll upon public faith in government administration. Historically, broad conceptions of the good of the commonwealth were employed to outweigh the interests of groups that resisted colonisation. In the decision-making of the British Empire, the standard approach for justifying the marginalisation of the interests of colonised groups was that they were uncivilised and that particular hardships were the price to be paid for bringing to them the imperial dividend of industrial society. It is widely assumed that with the dismantling of the British Empire, such impulses and their accompanying jurisprudence became a thing of the past. Even as decolonisation proceeded apace after the Second World War, however, the UK maintained control of strategically important islands with a view towards sustaining its global role. In an infamous example from this twilight period of empire, in the 1960s imperial interests were used to justify the expulsion of the Chagos islanders from the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Into the twenty-first century, this forced elision of the UK’s interests with the imperial ‘common good’ continues to take centre stage in courtroom battles over the islanders’ rights, being cited before domestic and international tribunals in order to maintain the Chagossians’ exclusion from their homeland. This article considers the new jurisprudence of imperialism which has emerged in a string of decisions which have continued to marginalise the Chagossians’ interests.

Developing meaningful names for government units that promote tourism can serve to facilitate more efficient identification by interested others. While the process would appear to be relatively intuitive (i.e., use of descriptive/suggestive identifiers), the results of this study reveal that the names used for official US state/commonwealth units responsible for administrating and promoting tourism-related commerce to businesses and visitors do not always include tourism-related identifiers. First, the review of inward-facing units (i.e., administrative units responsible for promoting business commerce in tourism) reveals that some of the states/commonwealths do not appear to use names that clearly identify the unit as tourism related. Second, the review of outward-facing units (the official state/commonwealth websites dedicated to promoting tourism to visitors) reveal that some of the domain names either do not reflect a clear tourism focus and/or may be difficult to interpret. To mitigate potential interpretational issues with the names, it is recommended that administrators consider the use of descriptive/suggestive names that more clearly identify the unit as tourism related.

Refugee depots for Polish emigrants in Châteauroux and Indre department in the years 1831–1833 In the article the author presents the setting up and operation of refugee depots (Fr. dépôts) in the Indre department for Polish emigrants who arrived in France after the fall of the November Uprising. The refugee depot in Châteauroux was one of the several depots founded by the French government. It was intended for civil exiles. The other camps for military refugees were set up in Avignon, Lunel, Besançon, Bourges, Lons-le-Saunier, Salins and Dijon. From the beginning of August 1832 till August 1833, the French authorities directed civilians to cities of Indre: Châteauroux – the capital of the department, as well as Issoudun, Levroux, La Chatre, Argenton, Buzançais, Chatillon, Saint Benoit, and La Blanc. The author establishes that in that period of time, 634 Polish refugees went through the camps of the Indre department. Most of them were students (from the Vilnius University), young officials and members of free professions. They came from the pre-partition areas of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Lithuania, Volhynia and Podolia). Despite the restrictive policy of the administration and the fact that they stayed in the French province, the Poles engaged in the social and political life of emigration. They participated actively in democratic and educational organizations of the Great Emigration. In many cases, by their own determination, they went to study and obtained aducation at French universities and technical universities. The article is based on sources from the Indre Department Archives in Châteauroux, archives of the Defense Historical Service in Vincennes, the National Archives in Paris, the Polish Library in Paris, the Princes Czartoryski Library in Krakow, and academic studies.

IntroductionGastric cancer with peritoneal metastasis has a poor outcome. Only a few studies have specifically investigated this group of patients. Japanese researchers have shown that chemotherapy with intraperitoneal paclitaxel (IPP) and oral S-1 (tegafur/gimeracil/oteracil) is active and well tolerated. These results have been achieved in a specific genetic pool (Japanese population), using regimens that may not be available in other parts of the world. We have designed this phase I trial to investigate IPP in combination with a standard chemotherapy combination in these patients.MethodsWe use a 3+3 expanded cohort dose escalation until a predefined number of dose-limiting toxicities are reached. Patients will have an intraperitoneal catheter placed surgically after trial enrolment. Chemotherapy includes a maximum of six cycles (21 days) of capecitabine (X) (1000 mg/m2two times a day, days 1–14)+cisplatin (C) (intravenous 80 mg/m2day 1) and IPP (days 1 and 8) with the following doses: cohort-1: 10 mg/m2, cohort-2: 20 mg/m2and cohort-3: 30 mg/m2. Primary endpoint is to determine the maximum tolerated dose of IPP. Secondary endpoints include determining the safety and tolerability of IPP in combination with C and X, overall response rates, ascites response rate, progression-free survival, overall survival and effects on quality of life.Important inclusion criteria include age ≥18 years, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 non-amplified gastric adenocarcinoma with histological or cytology-proven peritoneal involvement and adequate organ function. Exclusion criteria include previous malignancy within 5 years, recent abdominal or pelvic radiation treatment, significant abdominal adhesions or sepsis.Ethics and disseminationThe study is approved by Southern Adelaide Clinical Human Research Ethics Committee. A manuscript will be prepared for publication on the completion of the trial. This study will be conducted according to the Note for Guidance on Good Clinical Practice (CPMP/ICH/135/95) annotated with TGA comments (Therapeutic Goods Administration DSEB July 2000) and in compliance with applicable laws and regulations. The study will be performed in accordance with the NHMRC Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans (© Commonwealth of Australia 2007), and the NHMRC Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (©Australian Government 2007), and the principles laid down by the World Medical Assembly in the Declaration of Helsinki 2008.Trial registration numberACTRN12614001063606.

On 30 April 2009, the Productivity Commission released its Review of Regulatory Burden on the Upstream Petroleum Sector. The report identified significant unnecessary costs from delays and uncertainties in obtaining approvals, duplication of compliance requirements and inconsistent administration of regulatory processes. The commission found that these burdens could be reduced through new institutional arrangements—principally the establishment of a national offshore regulator—as well as implementation of best practice regulatory principles in all jurisdictions. On 5 August 2009, the Commonwealth Minister for Resources and Energy, the Hon Martin Ferguson AM MP, announced the Australian Government’s intention to establish a national offshore petroleum regulator in Commonwealth offshore areas, from 1 January 2012. The Council of Australian Governments is scheduled to consider an all-of-governments’ response to the commission’s recommendations in early 2010. The paper will discuss the policy rationale for reform, the proposed reforms and how they will be implemented.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has competition and fair-trading law responsibility for Australian industries. It has gained regulatory responsibilities for third-party access to telecommunications, soon will become the national regulator of gas pipeline access under a legislated code developed by the jurisdictions and industry working in a common forum, and will progressively become the national regulator of electricity transmission.This paper describes the ACCC's concept of the term 'efficient incentive regulation', gives examples of government decisions on network industry operations to which it is relevant and describes the general approach the ACCC will take in applying that concept, to encourage competition, innovation, economic investment and fair dealing by suppliers with users.The paper describes the relevance of the rise of national product markets and convergence in the delivery of telecommunications, electricity and gas services to the types of decisions the ACCC and State-based regulators will have to take and places those decisions in the context of common issues in regulatory reform internationally. Regulatory decisions taken for one network industry may have particular positive effects if the underlying principles flow on to others.A necessary part of dealing with national industries is the coordination of regulatory effort where Commonwealth and State/Territory regulators are involved. There is the risk in Australia that separation of regulatory powers between jurisdictional and national levels may cause welfare gains to business, customers and the wider community arising from the industry reform process to be lost if there are shortcomings in communications between regulators, duplication of effort or inconsistencies in approach. The paper describes the current division of responsibilities; the potential of the Utility Regulators' Forum to coordinate regulatory effort; and indicates the potential for losses of welfare and economic efficiency if COAG principles of a national approach to regulation are not fully embraced.The paper discusses the range of tools available to deal with challenges arising from privatisations, from the entry of multinational players to network industries and from the implementation of competition policy reforms, drawing on concerns about network industries raised with the ACCC, and on the ACCC's broader complaints experience. Finally, the paper outlines the reasons for policy-makers to pay particular attention to shaping and bringing light-handed but effective regulation to the areas of the converging network industries where market power remains unconstrained by competition, and for regulators to coordinate their administration of the regulated areas of network industries so that the policy objectives of incentive regulation are realised, resulting in the industry, users and the community sharing in the benefits.

The DebateQuestion 1: Various commentators have frequently invoked the importance of moderate Muslims and the role that they can play in fighting extremism in the Muslim world. But it is not clear who is a moderate Muslim. The recent cancellation of Tariq Ramadan’s visa to the United States, the raids on several American Muslim organizations, and the near marginalization of mainstream American Muslims in North America pose the following question: If moderate Muslims are critical to an American victory in the war on terror, then why does the American government frequently take steps that undermine moderate Muslims? Perhaps there is a lack of clarity about who the moderate Muslims are. In your view, who are these moderate Muslims and what are their beliefs and politics? AC: I would like to say from the outset that I am neither a Muslim nor a sociologist. Therefore, my remarks should be taken as those of an interested and sympathetic outsider. I do not believe at all that the American government “undermines” moderate Muslims. The problem is more complicated. Many American officials abhor engagement in religion or the politics of religion. They believe that the American Constitution separates religion and state and does not allow them to make distinctions when it comes to different interpretations of Islam. For some of them, Salafiya Islam is as good as Sufi Islam. Others do not have a sufficient knowledge base to sort out the moderates from the radicals, identify the retrograde fundamentalists, or recognize modernizers who want political Islam to dominate. This is wrong. Radical ideologies have to do more with politics and warfare than religion, and, in some extreme cases, should not enjoy the constitutional protections of freedom of religion or free speech. There is a difference between propagating a faith and disseminating hatred, violence, or murder. The latter is an abuse and exploitation of faith for political ends, and should be treated as such. For example, the racist Aryan Nation churches were prosecuted and bankrupted by American NGOs and the American government. One of the problems is that the American government allows radical Muslims who support terrorism to operate with impunity in the United States and around the world, and does very little to support moderate Muslims, especially in the conflict zones. To me, moderate Muslims are those who do not view the “greater jihad” either as a pillar of faith or as a predominant dimension thereof. A moderate is one who is searching for a dialogue and a compromise with people who adhere to other interpretations of the Qur’an, and with those who are not Muslim. Amoderate Sunni, for example, will not support terror attacks on Shi`ahs or Sufis, or on Christians, Jews, or Hindus. Moderate Muslims respect the right of individuals to disagree, to worship Allah the way they chose, or not to worship – and even not to believe. Amoderate Muslim is one who is willing to bring his or her brother or sister to faith by love and logic, not by mortal threats or force of arms. Amoderate Muslim decries suicide bombings and terrorist “operations,” and abhors those clerics who indoctrinate toward, bless, and support such atrocities. The list of moderate Muslims is too long to give all or even a part of it here. Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani (chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America) and Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi (secretarygeneral of the Rome-based Italian Muslim Association) come to mind. Ayatollah Ali Sistani may be a moderate, but I need to read more of his teachings. As the Wahhabi attacks against the Shi`ah escalate, Shi`i clerics and leaders are beginning to speak up. Examples include Sheikh Agha Jafri, a Westchester-based Pakistani Shi`ah who heads an organization called the Society for Humanity and Islam in America, and Tashbih Sayyed, a California-based Pakistani who serves as president of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance. I admire the bravery of Amina Wadud, a female professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who led a mixed-gender Friday Islamic prayer service, according to Mona Eltahawy’s op-ed piece in The Washington Post on Friday, March 18, 2005 (“A Prayer Toward Equality”). Another brave woman is the co-founder of the Progressive Muslim Union of America, Sarah Eltantawi. And the whole world is proud of the achievements of Judge Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2003. There is a problem with the first question, however. It contains several assumptions that are debatable, to say the least, if not outright false. First, it assumes that Tariq Ramadan is a “moderate.” Nevertheless, there is a near-consensus that Ramadan, while calling for ijtihad, is a supporter of the Egyptian Ikhwan al-Muslimin [the Muslim Brotherhood] and comes from that tradition [he is the grandson of its founder, Hasan al-Banna]. He also expressed support for Yusuf al-Qaradawi (and all he stands for) on a BBC TVprogram, and is viewed as an anti-Semite. He also rationalizes the murder of children, though apparently that does not preclude the European Social Forum from inviting him to be a member. He and Hasan al-Turabi, the founder of the Islamic state in Sudan, have exchanged compliments. There are numerous reports in the media, quoting intelligence sources and ex-terrorists, that Ramadan associates with the most radical circles, including terrorists. In its decision to ban Ramadan, the United States Department of Homeland Security was guided by a number of issues, some of them reported in the media and others classified. This is sufficient for me to believe that Ramadan may be a security risk who, in the post-9/11 environment, could reasonably be banned from entering the United States.1 Second, the raids on “American Muslim organizations” are, in fact, a part of law enforcement operations. Some of these steps have had to do with investigations of terrorist activities, such as the alleged Libyan conspiracy to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Others focused on American Islamist organizations that were funding the terrorist activities of groups on the State Department’s terrorism watch list, such as Hamas. To say that these criminal investigations are targeting moderate Islam is like saying that investigating pedophile priests undermines freedom of religion in the United States. Finally, American Muslims are hardly marginalized. They enjoy unencumbered religious life and support numerous non-governmental organizations that often take positions highly critical of domestic and foreign policy – something that is often not the case in their countries of origin. There is no job discrimination – some senior Bush Administration officials, such as Elias A. Zerhouni, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are Muslims. American presidents have congratulated Muslims on religious holidays and often invite Muslim clergymen to important state functions, such as the funeral of former president Ronald Reagan.

The DebateQuestion 1: Various commentators have frequently invoked the importance of moderate Muslims and the role that they can play in fighting extremism in the Muslim world. But it is not clear who is a moderate Muslim. The recent cancellation of Tariq Ramadan’s visa to the United States, the raids on several American Muslim organizations, and the near marginalization of mainstream American Muslims in North America pose the following question: If moderate Muslims are critical to an American victory in the war on terror, then why does the American government frequently take steps that undermine moderate Muslims? Perhaps there is a lack of clarity about who the moderate Muslims are. In your view, who are these moderate Muslims and what are their beliefs and politics? AC: I would like to say from the outset that I am neither a Muslim nor a sociologist. Therefore, my remarks should be taken as those of an interested and sympathetic outsider. I do not believe at all that the American government “undermines” moderate Muslims. The problem is more complicated. Many American officials abhor engagement in religion or the politics of religion. They believe that the American Constitution separates religion and state and does not allow them to make distinctions when it comes to different interpretations of Islam. For some of them, Salafiya Islam is as good as Sufi Islam. Others do not have a sufficient knowledge base to sort out the moderates from the radicals, identify the retrograde fundamentalists, or recognize modernizers who want political Islam to dominate. This is wrong. Radical ideologies have to do more with politics and warfare than religion, and, in some extreme cases, should not enjoy the constitutional protections of freedom of religion or free speech. There is a difference between propagating a faith and disseminating hatred, violence, or murder. The latter is an abuse and exploitation of faith for political ends, and should be treated as such. For example, the racist Aryan Nation churches were prosecuted and bankrupted by American NGOs and the American government. One of the problems is that the American government allows radical Muslims who support terrorism to operate with impunity in the United States and around the world, and does very little to support moderate Muslims, especially in the conflict zones. To me, moderate Muslims are those who do not view the “greater jihad” either as a pillar of faith or as a predominant dimension thereof. A moderate is one who is searching for a dialogue and a compromise with people who adhere to other interpretations of the Qur’an, and with those who are not Muslim. Amoderate Sunni, for example, will not support terror attacks on Shi`ahs or Sufis, or on Christians, Jews, or Hindus. Moderate Muslims respect the right of individuals to disagree, to worship Allah the way they chose, or not to worship – and even not to believe. Amoderate Muslim is one who is willing to bring his or her brother or sister to faith by love and logic, not by mortal threats or force of arms. Amoderate Muslim decries suicide bombings and terrorist “operations,” and abhors those clerics who indoctrinate toward, bless, and support such atrocities. The list of moderate Muslims is too long to give all or even a part of it here. Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani (chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America) and Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi (secretarygeneral of the Rome-based Italian Muslim Association) come to mind. Ayatollah Ali Sistani may be a moderate, but I need to read more of his teachings. As the Wahhabi attacks against the Shi`ah escalate, Shi`i clerics and leaders are beginning to speak up. Examples include Sheikh Agha Jafri, a Westchester-based Pakistani Shi`ah who heads an organization called the Society for Humanity and Islam in America, and Tashbih Sayyed, a California-based Pakistani who serves as president of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance. I admire the bravery of Amina Wadud, a female professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who led a mixed-gender Friday Islamic prayer service, according to Mona Eltahawy’s op-ed piece in The Washington Post on Friday, March 18, 2005 (“A Prayer Toward Equality”). Another brave woman is the co-founder of the Progressive Muslim Union of America, Sarah Eltantawi. And the whole world is proud of the achievements of Judge Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2003. There is a problem with the first question, however. It contains several assumptions that are debatable, to say the least, if not outright false. First, it assumes that Tariq Ramadan is a “moderate.” Nevertheless, there is a near-consensus that Ramadan, while calling for ijtihad, is a supporter of the Egyptian Ikhwan al-Muslimin [the Muslim Brotherhood] and comes from that tradition [he is the grandson of its founder, Hasan al-Banna]. He also expressed support for Yusuf al-Qaradawi (and all he stands for) on a BBC TVprogram, and is viewed as an anti-Semite. He also rationalizes the murder of children, though apparently that does not preclude the European Social Forum from inviting him to be a member. He and Hasan al-Turabi, the founder of the Islamic state in Sudan, have exchanged compliments. There are numerous reports in the media, quoting intelligence sources and ex-terrorists, that Ramadan associates with the most radical circles, including terrorists. In its decision to ban Ramadan, the United States Department of Homeland Security was guided by a number of issues, some of them reported in the media and others classified. This is sufficient for me to believe that Ramadan may be a security risk who, in the post-9/11 environment, could reasonably be banned from entering the United States.1 Second, the raids on “American Muslim organizations” are, in fact, a part of law enforcement operations. Some of these steps have had to do with investigations of terrorist activities, such as the alleged Libyan conspiracy to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Others focused on American Islamist organizations that were funding the terrorist activities of groups on the State Department’s terrorism watch list, such as Hamas. To say that these criminal investigations are targeting moderate Islam is like saying that investigating pedophile priests undermines freedom of religion in the United States. Finally, American Muslims are hardly marginalized. They enjoy unencumbered religious life and support numerous non-governmental organizations that often take positions highly critical of domestic and foreign policy – something that is often not the case in their countries of origin. There is no job discrimination – some senior Bush Administration officials, such as Elias A. Zerhouni, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are Muslims. American presidents have congratulated Muslims on religious holidays and often invite Muslim clergymen to important state functions, such as the funeral of former president Ronald Reagan.

In 2014, a set of National Decision-Making Principles (the Principles) was recommended by theAustralian Law Reform Commission as a legal policy guide for reform of Commonwealth, State and Territory laws. The Principles were aimed to encourage supported decision-making; make the appointment of representatives only a last resort; and to ensure that the will, preferences and rights of individuals direct decisions affecting their lives. This article discusses the sources of the Principles and their relationship to Art 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The article then examines the steps that are needed to give the Principles full effect in Australian laws to regulate decision-making by individuals who require support. A major focus in implementing a paradigm shift towards supported decision-making is reform of State and Territory guardianship and administration laws. The article examines how guardianship laws should be reformed consistently with the Principles - to ensure that guardianship is invoked only as a last resort and after considering the availability of support to assist people in decision-making. Further, guardianship should be as confined in scope and duration as is reasonably possible; subject to accessible mechanisms for review; and decision-making should respect the will, preferences and rights of the individual. At Commonwealth level, the National Disability Insurance Scheme legislation incorporates some elements of supported decision-making. However, these should also be augmented by providing legal recognition for supporters, and associated safeguards. The author suggests that the Principles can be a catalyst for facilitating important law reform over following decades. The article examines how the Principles may be used by communities, policy-makers and governments to promote world-leading legal changes to ensure that individuals with disability have an equal right to make decisions for themselves.

The introduction of New Public Management in the public services of many countries brought with it not only changes in epistemology but new methods and techniques for managing resources.1, 2, 3, 4 With the advent of New Public Management, for instance, techniques such as contracting out, divestment, and the disaggregation of the public services into separate self contained units were employed by many governments to increase output and reduce cost in the public sector. However, it was also recognized that another resource, namely how employees are managed, needed to be reformed as well. This concern for proper management of human resources was implicit in one of the primary tenets of New Public Management, which stressed that managers should be “free to manage.”5 This “freedom to manage” principle involved more than changes in the process of decision-making. Indeed, it led to a radical attempt on the part of various states to replace the former systems of personnel administration with the “new” private sector system of human resource management. This article examines the attempts to reform, human resource management systems in the public services of two of the larger countries in the Commonwealth Caribbean—Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. It argues that although these two countries share a remarkable commonality in terms of historical backgrounds, and political and economic developments, the human resource systems that were introduced under the wider ambit of administrative reform varied. Moreover, it was evident that Jamaica was far more successful in the actual implementation of human resource systems than Trinidad and Tobago. What is even more striking is the fact that reformers in both countries took only what they wanted from the reform package and in some cases amended them in the light of factors such as ethnicity, political culture, party dominance, or levels of economic development.

While most democratic governments include some political appointees at the top of agencies for the sake of bureaucratic accountability, too much patronage decreases government performance. Puerto Rico has all of the components for a robust merit system on paper, but it is consistently undermined, with significant negative consequences for public employees. Based on an inductive analysis of 29 in-depth interviews with public employees and 50 political discrimination court cases, this article shows how an informal patronage system is implemented by incorporating political information into personnel decisions. The pervasiveness of this system results in employees being categorized as either insiders or outsiders, where outsider status is accompanied by harassment, ostracizing, and other negative changes in working conditions. These shifts in status sustain patronage practices by crystalizing political identity, which increases partisan polarization, and provides a rationale and justification for future politically discriminatory actions.

The authors in this issue highlight crucial issues facing Commonwealth local governments today − ensuring national influence, maximising revenue generation, encouraging probity in staffing appointments, or dealing with problems of social exclusion and alcoholism, are some of the varied challenges faced by local administrations.

In mid-2001, in a cultural policy discussion at Arts Queensland, an Australian state government arts policy and funding apparatus, a senior arts bureaucrat seeking to draw a funding client’s gaze back to the bigger picture of what the state government was trying to achieve through its cultural policy settings excused his own abstracting comments with the phrase, “but then I might just be a policy ‘wank’”. There was some awkward laughter before one of his colleagues asked, “did you mean a policy ‘wonk’”? The incident was a misstatement of a term adopted in the 1990s to characterise the policy workers in the Clinton Whitehouse (Cunningham). This was not its exclusive use, but many saw Clinton as an exemplary wonk: less a pragmatic politician than one entertained by the elaboration of policy. The policy work of Clinton’s kitchen cabinet was, in part, driven by a pervasive rationalist belief in the usefulness of ordered policy processes as a method of producing social and economic outcomes, and, in part, by the seductions of policy-play: its ambivalences, its conundrums, and, in some sense, its aesthetics (Klein 193-94). There, far from being characterised as unproductive “self-abuse” of the body-politic, policy processes were alive as a pragmatic technology, an operationalisation of ideology, as an aestheticised field of play, but more than anything as a central rationalist tenant of government action. This final idea—the possibilities of policy for effecting change, promoting development, meeting government objectives—is at the centre of the bureaucratic imagination. Policy is effective. And a concomitant belief is that ordered or organised policy processes result in the best policy and the best outcomes. Starting with Harold Lasswell, policy theorists extended the general rationalist suppositions of Western representative democracies into executive government by arguing for the value of information/knowledge and the usefulness of ordered process in addressing thus identified policy problems. In the post-war period particularly, a case can be made for the usefulness of policy processes to government—although, in a paradox, these rationalist conceptions of the policy process were strangely irrational, even Utopian, in their view of transformational capacities possibilities of policy. The early policy scientists often moved beyond a view of policy science as a useful tool, to the advocacy of policy science and the policy scientist as panaceas for public ills (Parsons 18-19). The Utopian ambitions of policy science finds one of their extremes in the contemporary interest in whole-of-government approaches to policy making. Whole-of-governmentalism, concern with co-ordination of policy and delivery across all areas of the state, can seen as produced out of Western governments’ paradoxical concern with (on one hand) order, totality, and consistency, and (on the other) deconstructing existing mechanisms of public administration. Whole-of-governmentalism requires a horizontal purview of government goals, programs, outputs, processes, politics, and outcomes, alongside—and perhaps in tension with—the long-standing vertical purview that is fundamental to ministerial responsibility. This often presents a set of public management problems largely internal to government. Policy discussion and decision-making, while affecting community outcomes and stakeholder utility, are, in this circumstance, largely inter-agency in focus. Any eventual policy document may well have bureaucrats rather than citizens as its target readers—or at least as its closest readers. Internally, cohesion of objective, discourse, tool and delivery are pursued as a prime interests of policy making. Failing at Policy So what happens when whole-of-government policy processes, particularly cultural policy processes, break down or fail? Is there anything productive to be retrieved from a failed fantasy of policy cohesion? This paper examines the utility of a failure to cohere and order in cultural policy processes. I argue that the conditions of contemporary cultural policy-making, particularly the tension between the “boutique” scale of cultural policy-making bodies and the revised, near universal, remit of cultural policy, require policy work to be undertaken in an environment and in such a way that failure is almost inevitable. Coherence and cohesions are fundamental principles of whole-of-government policy but cultural policy ambitions are necessarily too comprehensive to be achievable. This is especially so for the small arts or cultural offices government that normally act as lead agencies for cultural policy development within government. Yet, that these failed processes can still give rise to positive outcomes or positive intermediate outputs that can be taken up in a productive way in the ongoing cycle of policy work that categorises contemporary cultural governance. Herein, I detail the development of Building the Future, a cultural policy planning paper (and the name of a policy planning process) undertaken within Arts Queensland in 1999 and 2000. (While this process is now ten years in the past, it is only with a decade past that as a consultant I am in apposition to write about the material.) The abandonment of this process before the production of a public policy program allows something to be said about the utility and role of failure in cultural policy-making. The working draft of Building the Future never became a public document, but the eight months of its development helped produce a series of shifts in the discourse of Queensland Government cultural policy: from “arts” to “creative industries”; and from arts bureaucracy-centred cultural policy to the whole-of-government policy frameworks. These concepts were then taken up and elaborated in the Creative Queensland policy statement published by Arts Queensland in October 2002, particularly the concern with creative industries; whole-of-government cultural policy; and the repositioning of Arts Queensland as a service agency to other potential cultural funding-bodies within government. Despite the failure of the Building the Future process, it had a role in the production of the policy document and policy processes that superseded it. This critique of cultural policy-making rather than cultural policy texts, announcements and settings is offered as part of a project to bring to cultural policy studies material and theoretical accounts of the particularities of making cultural policy. While directions in cultural policy have much to do with the overall directions of government—which might over the past decade be categorised as focus on de-regulation, out-sourcing of services—there are developments in cultural policy settings and in cultural policy processes that are particular to cultural policy and cultural policy-making. Central to the development of cultural policy studies and to cultural policy is a transformational broadening of the operant definition of culture within government (O'Regan). Following Raymond Williams, the domain of culture is broadened to include the high culture, popular culture, folk culture and the culture of everyday life. Accordingly, in some sense, every issue of governance is deemed to have a cultural dimension—be it policy questions around urban space, tourism, community building and so on. Contemporary governments are required to act with a concern for cultural questions both within and across a number of long-persisting and otherwise discrete policy silos. This has implications for cultural policy makers and for program delivery. The definition of culture as “everyday life”, while truistically defendable, becomes unwieldy as an imprimatur or a container for administrative activity. Transforming cultural policy into a domain incorporating most social policy and significant elements of economic policy makes the domain titanically large. Potentially, it compromises usual government efforts to order policy activity through the division or apportionment of responsibility (Glover and Cunningham 19). The problem has given rise to a new mode of policy-making which attends to the co-ordination of policy across and between levels of government, known as whole-of government policy-making (see O’Regan). Within the domain of cultural policy the task of whole-of-government cultural policy is complicated by the position of, and the limits upon, arts and cultural bureaux within state and federal governments. Dedicated cultural planning bureaux often operate as “boutique” agencies. They are usually discrete line agencies or line departments within government—only rarely are they part of the core policy function of departments of a Premier or a Prime Minister. Instead, like most line agencies, they lack the leverage within the bureaucracy or policy apparatus to deliver whole-of-government cultural policy change. In some sense, failure is the inevitable outcome of all policy processes, particularly when held up against the mechanistic representation of policy processes in policy typical of policy handbooks (see Bridgman and Davis 42). Against such models, which describe policy a series of discrete linear steps, all policy efforts fail. The rationalist assumptions of early policy models—and the rigid templates for policy process that arise from their assumptions—in retrospect condemn every policy process to failure or at least profound shortcoming. This is particularly so with whole-of-government cultural policy making To re-think this, it can be argued that the error then is not really in the failure of the process, which is invariably brought about by the difficulty for coherent policy process to survive exogenous complexity, but instead the error rests with the simplicity of policy models and assumptions about the possibility of cohesion. In some sense, mechanistic policy processes make failure endogenous. The contemporary experience of making policy has tended to erode any fantasies of order, clear process, or, even, clear-sightedness within government. Achieving a coherence to the policy message is nigh on impossible—likewise cohesion of the policy framework is unlikely. Yet, importantly, failed policy is not without value. The churn of policy work—the exercise of attempting cohrent policy-making—constitutes, in some sense, the deliberative function of government, and potentially operates as a force (and site) of change. Policy briefings, reports, and draft policies—the constitution of ideas in the policy process and the mechanism for their dissemination within the body of government and perhaps to other stakeholders—are discursive acts in the process of extending the discourse of government and forming its later actions. For arts and cultural policy agencies in particular, who act without the leverage or resources of central agencies, the expansive ambitions of whole-of-government cultural policy makes failure inevitable. In such a circumstance, retrieving some benefits at the margins of policy processes, through the churn of policy work towards cohesion, is an important consolation. Case study: Cultural Policy 2000 The policy process I wish to examine is now complete. It ran over the period 1999–2002, although I wish to concentrate on my involvement in the process in early 2000 during which, as a consultant to Arts Queensland, I generated a draft policy document, Building the Future: A policy framework for the next five years (working draft). The imperative to develop a new state cultural policy followed the election of the first Beattie Labor government in July 1998. By 1999, senior Arts Queensland staff began to argue (within government at least) for the development of a new state cultural policy. The bureaucrats perceived policy development as one way of establishing “traction” in the process of bidding for new funds for the portfolio. Arts Minister Matt Foley was initially reluctant to “green-light” the policy process, but eventually in early 1999 he acceded to it on the advice of Arts Queensland, the industry, his own policy advisors and the Department of Premier. As stated above, this case study is offered now because the passing of time makes the analysis of relatively sensitive material possible. From the outset, an abbreviated timeframe for consultation and drafting seem to guarantee a difficult birth for the policy document. This was compounded by a failure to clarity the aims and process of the project. In presenting the draft policy to the advisory group, it became clear that there was no agreed strategic purpose to the document: Was it to be an advertisement, a framework for policy ideas, an audit, or a report on achievements? Tied to this, were questions about the audience for the policy statement. Was it aimed at the public, the arts industry, bureaucrats inside Arts Queensland, or, in keeping with the whole-of-government inflection to the document and its putative use in bidding for funds inside government, bureaucrats outside of Arts Queensland? My own conception of the document was as a cultural policy framework for the whole-of-government for the coming five years. It would concentrate on cultural policy in three realms: Arts Queensland; the arts instrumentalities; and other departments (particularly the cultural initiatives undertaken by the Department of Premier and the Department of State Development). In order to do this I articulated (for myself) a series of goals for the document. It needed to provide the philosophical underpinnings for a new arts and cultural policy, discuss the cultural significance of “community” in the context of the arts, outline expansion plans for the arts infrastructure throughout Queensland, advance ideas for increased employment in the arts and cultural industries, explore the development of new audiences and markets, address contemporary issues of technology, globalisation and culture commodification, promote a whole-of-government approach to the arts and cultural industries, address social justice and equity concerns associated with cultural diversity, and present examples of current and new arts and cultural practices. Five key strategies were identified: i) building strong communities and supporting diversity; ii) building the creative industries and the cultural economy; iii) developing audiences and telling Queensland’s stories; iv) delivering to the world; and v) a new role for government. While the second aim of building the creative industries and the cultural economy was an addition to the existing Australian arts policy discourse, it is the articulation of a new role for government that is most radical here. The document went to the length of explicitly suggesting a series of actions to enable Arts Queensland to re-position itself inside government: develop an ongoing policy cycle; position Arts Queensland as a lead agency for cultural policy development; establish a mechanism for joint policy planning across the arts portfolio; adopt a whole-of-government approach to policy-making and program delivery; use arts and cultural strategies to deliver on social and economic policy agendas; centralise some cultural policy functions and project; maintain and develop mechanisms and peer assessment; establish long-term strategic relationships with the Commonwealth and local government; investigate new vehicles for arts and cultural investment; investigate partnerships between industry, community and government; and develop appropriate performance measures for the cultural industries. In short, the scope of the document was titanically large, and prohibitively expansive as a basis for policy change. A chief limitation of these aims is that they seem to place the cohesion and coherence of the policy discourse at the centre of the project—when it might have better privileged a concern with policy outputs and industry/community outcomes. The subsequent dismal fortunes of the document are instructive. The policy document went through several drafts over the first half of 2000. By August 2000, I had removed myself from the process and handed the drafting back to Arts Queensland which then produced shorter version less discursive than my initial draft. However, by November 2000, it is reasonable to say that the policy document was abandoned. Significantly, after May 2000 the working drafts began to be used as internal discussion documents with government. Thus, despite the abandonment of the policy process, largely due to the unworkable breadth of its ambition, the document had a continued policy utility. The subsequent discussions helped organise future policy statements and structural adjustments by government. After the re-election of the Beattie government in January 2001, a more substantial policy process was commenced with the earlier policy documents as a starting point. By early 2002 the document was in substantial draft. The eventual policy, Creative Queensland, was released in October 2002. Significantly, this document sought to advance two ideas that I believe the earlier process did much to mobilise: a whole-of-government approach to culture; and a broader operant definition of culture. It is important not to see these as ideas merely existing “textually” in the earlier policy draft of Building the Future, but instead to see them as ideas that had begun adhere themselves to the cultural policy mechanism of government, and begun to be deployed in internal policy discussions and in program design, before finding an eventual home in a published policy text. Analysis The productive effects of the aborted policy process in which I participated are difficult to quantify. They are difficult, in fact, to separate out from governments’ ongoing processes of producing and circulating policy ideas. What is clear is that the effects of Building the Future were not entirely negated by it never becoming public. Instead, despite only circulating to a readership of bureaucrats it represented the ideas of part of the bureaucracy at a point in time. In this instance, a “failed” policy process, and its intermediate outcomes, the draft policy, through the churn of policy work, assisted government towards an eventual policy statement and a new form of governmental organisation. This suggests that processes of cultural policy discussion, or policy churn, can be as productive as the public “enunciation” of formal policy in helping to organise ideas within government and determine programs and the allocation of resources. This is even so where the Utopian idealism of the policy process is abandoned for something more graspable or politic. For the small arts or cultural policy bureau this is an important incremental benefit. Two final implications should be noted. The first is for models of policy process. Bridgman and Davis’s model of the Australian policy cycle, despite its mechanistic qualities, is ambiguous about where the policy process begins and ends. In one instance they represent it as linear but strictly circular, always coming back to its own starting point (27). Elsewhere, however, they represent it as linear, but not necessarily circular, passing through eight stages with a defined beginning and end: identification of issues; policy analysis; choosing policy instruments; consultation; co-ordination; decision; implementation; and evaluation (28–29). What is clear from the 1999-2002 policy process—if we take the full period between when Arts Queensland began to organise the development of a new arts policy and its publication as Creative Queensland in October 2002—is that the policy process was not a linear one progressing in an orderly fashion towards policy outcomes. Instead, Building the Future, is a snapshot in time (namely early to mid-2000) of a fragmenting policy process; it reveals policy-making as involving a concurrency of policy activity rather than a progression through linear steps. Following Mark Considine’s conception of policy work as the state’s effort at “system-wide information exchange and policy transfer” (271), the document is concerned less in the ordering of resources than the organisation of policy discourse. The churn of policy is the mobilisation of information, or for Considine: policy-making, when considered as an innovation system among linked or interdependent actors, becomes a learning and regulating web based upon continuous exchanges of information and skill. Learning occurs through regulated exchange, rather than through heroic insight or special legislative feats of the kind regularly described in newspapers. (269) The acceptance of this underpins a turn in contemporary accounts of policy (Considine 252-72) where policy processes become contingent and incomplete Policy. The ordering of policy is something to be attempted rather than achieved. Policy becomes pragmatic and ad hoc. It is only coherent in as much as a policy statement represents a bringing together of elements of an agency or government’s objectives and program. The order, in some sense, arrives through the act of collection, narrativisation and representation. The second implication is more directly for cultural policy makers facing the prospect of whole-of-government cultural policy making. While it is reasonable for government to wish to make coherent totalising statements about its cultural interests, such ambitions bring the near certainty of failure for the small agency. Yet these failures of coherence and cohesion should be viewed as delivering incremental benefits through the effort and process of this policy “churn”. As was the case with the Building the Future policy process, while aborted it was not a totally wasted effort. Instead, Building the Future mobilised a set of ideas within Arts Queensland and within government. For the small arts or cultural bureaux approaching the enormous task of whole-of government cultural policy making such marginal benefits are important. References Arts Queensland. Creative Queensland: The Queensland Government Cultural Policy 2002. Brisbane: Arts Queensland, 2002. Bridgman, Peter, and Glyn Davis. Australian Policy Handbook. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998. Considine, Mark. Public Policy: A Critical Approach. South Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. Cunningham, Stuart. "Willing Wonkers at the Policy Factory." Media Information Australia 73 (1994): 4-7. Glover, Stuart, and Stuart Cunningham. "The New Brisbane." Artlink 23.2 (2003): 16-23. Glover, Stuart, and Gillian Gardiner. Building the Future: A Policy Framework for the Next Five Years (Working Draft). Brisbane: Arts Queensland, 2000. Klein, Joe. "Eight Years." New Yorker 16 & 23 Oct. 2000: 188-217. O'Regan, Tom. "Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither". 2001. rtf.file. 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