School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 21
-
ItemThe women on the hill : an ethnographic study of deinstitutionalization(University of Melbourne, 1995)
-
ItemThe status of women in Islam : a case study of Pakistan(University of Melbourne, 1999)
-
ItemBlue army: paramilitary policing in Victoria( 1998)This thesis focuses on the changes to law enforcement precipitated by the establishment of counter terrorist squads within State police forces during the late 1970's. It looks at the impact of Victoria's specialist counter terrorist squad, the Special Operations Group (SOG), on policing in Victoria and asks whether the group has led to the development of a more 'military based' approach to policing. The research demonstrates that the SOG has been the harbinger of more military styles of policing involving high levels of confrontation, more lethal weapons and a greater range of weapons and more frequent recourse to deadly force. The establishment of groups like the SOG has also undermined Australia's democratic traditions by blurring the boundaries between the police and military and weakening the safeguards which have in then past prevented military force being used against citizens. The SOG has acted as a vanguard group within Victoria police, anticipating and leading progress towards a range of new military-style tactics and weapons. The SOG, although relatively small in number,, has had a marked influence on the tactics and operations of police throughout the force. The group was never contained to dealing with only terrorist incidents but instead used for a range of more traditional police duties. While terrorism has remained rare in Australia the SOG has nevertheless expanded in size and role. Because the SOG is considered elite and because the SOG are frequently temporarily seconded to other areas of policing, SOG members provide a role for other police and have the opportunity to introduce parliamentary tactics into an extended range of police duties. The parliamentary skills developed by the SOG have been passes on to ordinary police through training programs headed by former SOG officers. In addition, the group has effectively been used as a testing ground for new weapons. The structure of the Victoria Police Protective Security Group and the way public demonstrations and industrial disputes are viewed in police and security circles ensure that parliamentary counter terrorist tactics will be used to stifle dissent and protest. The move towards paramilitary policing is necessarily a move away from the police mandate to protect life, keep the peace and use only minimum force. The interrogation of SOG and SOG tactics into everyday policing has occurred without any public debate or recognition of the important democratic traditions that have ensured that military force is not used against citizens except in the most extreme circumstances. Although the SOG is not formally part of the military it is nevertheless a significant parliamentary force virtually indistinguishable in terms of the weapons and levels of force at its disposal from the military proper.
-
ItemDealing with deviance in contemporary Papua New Guinea societies: the choice of sanctions in village and local court proceedings( 1996-05)Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a country composed of thousands of tribes, clans, cultures and customs, with well over a hundred languages and totemic groupings spread sparsely across its lands (Bonney 1986: 2) (see Map A). Today the country has a total population of four million people (NSO 1991). Before colonisation, Papua New Guinea’s indigenous settlement patterns and social organisation reflected the fragmented nature of the country’s environment, its isolation from the eastern and western centres of civilisation, and the needs of small-scale subsistence economies. Over thousands of years, Melanesian societies have been too diverse for any particular area or group to typify the country’s culture or to maintain a dominant role within government. Deviance, regulatory mechanisms and methods used by each tribe or cultural group to resolve disputes, varied according to the community’s culture and customs. At the time of colonisation the indigenous people were artificially united in one nation-state. With the introduction of Western social, political, economic and judicial systems, they were forced to live under alien dispute resolution procedures and to accept an imposed Western system of sanctions, which overlaid or supplemented the customary dispute resolution procedures. Since colonisation, a Western legal system of sanctions has been imposed on Papua New Guineans in which the colonialists have overlooked traditional, unwritten customary systems.
-
ItemPauline, politics and psychoanalysis: theorising racism in Australia( 1999)This thesis uses a psychoanalytic approach to examine the phenomenon of the rise of the Pauline Hanson and the One Nation political party. Psychoanalysis, as the discipline concerned with developing an understanding of irrationality and the human emotions, is well-placed to tackle issues such as insecurity, resentment and racism. By reviewing the works of a number of psychoanalytic theorists, this thesis suggests ways that they may help us to understand the success of One Nation in Australia. Through this approach, I aim to bring new insights to the study of racism in contemporary Australia. The first part of this thesis consists of a survey of the contentions of six key psychoanalytic theorists. This analysis shows that psychoanalysis affords us an understanding of the subject as a complex being; attached to, and even constituted by, certain images and ideals. In the second section, I suggest ways in which psychoanalytic theory may assist us to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the Pauline Hanson phenomenon. This analysis deals with only a few selected aspects of Hansonism, but to the extent that this can be seen as a synecdoche of the whole, it suggests that the attainment of a full understanding of racism and the human emotions is more complex and difficult task than we often acknowledge.
-
ItemModernity, racism and subjectivity( 1995-10)Racism, understood as the form of ideology and the set of social practices based on explicit and implicit notions of biologically determined human ‘races’, is a modern phenomenon. Other major forms of social cleavage together with the ideologies which contribute to and support them, such as those which relate to class and gender, have had a complex relationship with racism. Nevertheless racism needs to be distinguished analytically from each of these, and given its due as a relatively autonomous system. Viewed from the perspective of the systematic patterning of social life, it has institutional backing and support. In the modern West especially, it has organised, and it continues to help organise, significant areas of social domain. It has a history, which includes the history of ideas and of representations of the Other, and it is closely tied to economic production and relations. Though it may be that racism is generated primarily at the social and economic levels, it is experienced psychologically, and psychology plays a role in its reproduction. Racism, then, needs to be examined not only in terms of its social structural features, but at the same time in terms of the involvement of subjectivity in its processes.
-
ItemImagining the Australian nation: settler-nationalism and aboriginality( 1999-11)The thesis examines different forms of Australian setter-nationalism, and their impact upon settler/indigenous relations. I examine the way that the development of specific forms of settler national consciousness has influenced the treatment of, thought about, and feeling towards the indigenous as a people or peoples. I claim that discourses of the nation operate, in an ongoing way, as shaping forces in everyday and public policy responses to the collective situation of Australia's indigenous peoples, and to the perception of their place in Australian society. The first part of the thesis provides a theoretical framework for understanding Australian settler-nationalism, drawing upon major theories of nationalism, postcolonialism and psychoanalysis. I provide a historical and political analysis of white Australian nationalism, emphasising its racist underpinnings, and its influence upon governmental policies of biological absorption and assimilation. The second part of the thesis analyses relations between settler Australia and indigenous peoples from the 1960s to the present. Drawing upon psychoanalysis, especially that of the British object-relations school pioneered by Melanie Klein, and many contemporary discourses of the nation, I develop an account of two specific modes of settler-nationalism, which I term assimilationist and indigenising. I examine the way that these different modes have influenced and shaped public debates on Aboriginal land rights and the movement for Aboriginal Reconciliation. The major political phases studied include: the events leading up to and surrounding the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976; the Hawke Labor Government’s attempt, between 1983 and 1986, to introduce national Aboriginal land rights legislation; what can be broadly characterised as the period “after Mabo”, including the political activity stirred by the High Court’s historic Mabo decision of 1992, the passing of the Native Title Act 1993, the Wik decision of 1996, the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and the Native Title Amendment Act 1997; and the period of the Government process of Aboriginal Reconciliation from 1991 to the present.
-
ItemGreening the Commonwealth: the Australian Labor Party government's management of national environmental politics, 1983-1996( 1998-07)Between 1983 and 1996, the environment emerged to become a major political issue in Australia to which a series of national public policy decisions was directed. In examining these policies, this thesis argues that the association of environmentalism with the politics of policy-making reflected the primary role played by the Australian Labor Party as the major political party in Government at that time. It reflected the Labor Government’s primary role in determining the nature and direction of the debate between 1983 and 1996. Of particular importance was a period in which the Labor Government sought to undertake institutional innovation in order to contain the environmental debate within the institutionalised policy-making process - a period described here as the ‘Accordist’; phase of Labor’s management of the environmental debate. The thesis challenges theoretical approaches that argue that relations between social democratic trade union based parties and the environmental movement have the potential to tend toward mutual antagonism. It also challenges the argument that environmentalism, as a manifestation of the ‘new politics’, necessarily involves a qualitative transformation of politics associated with new social movements. Rather, the thesis argues that the debate in Australia went beyond simply addressing controversial specific issues when they arose, to instead become an examination of the capacity for agencies and departments to incorporate environmental values into their decision-making, and about ways in which competing interest group demands could be reconciled through newly created government-led forums. (For complete abstract open document)
-
ItemSecurity in the hospitality industry( 1995-10)Problems and perceptions of crime and security have grown dramatically in recent decades. Organisations feel the need to protect their investment, their employees and the general public from crime. There are not sufficient public police to provide adequate response and protection to businesses; therefore, private security agents have grown in number as a response to this perceived need. This thesis examines private security and surveillance in the hotel industry. There is a general introduction to contemporary security issues in society. The specific nature of these problems is examined within the context of the hotel industry. These issues are analysed in relationship to recent scholarly literature. Since so little has been written about problems of security in the hotel industry, it was decided to conduct in-depth interviews, using multiple case studies and field observations. The thesis examines issues of security in seven major hotels in Australia. Although there are many alternative ways that security can be organised, this thesis examines the application of a differentiated model of security as contrasted to an imbedded model in which all employees are involved with security procedures.
-
ItemGlobalisation of the pharmaceutical industry and the Australian state: the transformation of a policy network( 1997)Processes of rationalisation and restructuring within the international drug industry in the past decade have altered the conditions for governance of Australia’s pharmaceutical sector. This thesis demonstrates that the balance of power within the domestic policy network shifted to favour multinational suppliers of prescription drugs after the Government in the late 1980s embraced the objective of making the regulatory and policy environment more user-friendly. The emphasis of state activities has moved away from welfare and public interest objectives towards provision of direct support for capital accumulation under conditions of globalising capitalism. The domain of pharmaceutical policy was historically characterised by corporatist bargaining between strong regulatory agencies within the Commonwealth Department of Health and centralised associations representing producer and professional interests. Following recent reform of these agencies and a reordering of their relative authority, the pattern of interaction within the policy network has become more open and politicised, with more active participation of groups representing consumers, patients and the research and development (R&D) community. Conversely, the capacity of Australian state agencies to manage and control sectoral change has diminished. A greater degree of pluralism at the level of interaction between the state of interest groups has evolved within the context of the principal trend towards marketisation and commodification within the drug sector. These conclusions arise from the empirical analysis of developments in the international pharmaceutical industry, including the formation of a transnational regulatory regime, and changes in domestic policy and regulatory practices. The thesis traces the ascendance of governance through the market mechanism at the expense of direct state control or corporatist bargaining. The investigation gives particular attention to: the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme; the Pharmaceutical Industry Development Program introduced in 1987, notably the Factor (f) scheme (which provides notional drug price increases in exchange for expanded industry activity); and the politics of brand substitution and generic drugs. It is shown that the Australian Government in the period under consideration, irrespective of party political composition, has pursued purposefully a policy of international integration derived from an acceptance of the imperative of retaining and attracting foreign capital. While the Factor (f) program as designed to sustain bargaining between the state and the multinational industry, it is demonstrated that the Department of Industry proved unable to maintain and generate support for strategically oriented industry policy. The changes identified and analysed in this thesis are consistent with the hypothesis of a hollowing out of the state associated with the decline of the Fordist model of accumulation and the Keynesian welfare state. A feature of this transition is the subordination of social policy to the imperatives of innovation, flexibility and international competitiveness.