School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemJobless parents, unhealthy children? How past exposure to parental joblessness influences children's future health(ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2022-09-01)Rationale: Despite a growing body of work investigating the combined effects of maternal and paternal joblessness for children's outcomes, very little is known about the long-term effects of parental joblessness on children's health, and especially health during adulthood. Objective: The primary objective of this study is to directly test whether exposure to parental joblessness during childhood and early adulthood has adverse consequences for health in later years. This study also explores whether family resources, time inputs and family harmony mediate this relationship. Methods: Multilevel generalized structural equation models describing processes influencing child health outcomes in later life are estimated using longitudinal data from 19 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (N = 2875 individuals and 22,942 person-year observations). Results: Parental joblessness, especially when experienced over a protracted period, is found to impose a penalty on children's mental health in later life, which is mostly not mediated by other variables. A significant negative association with general health is also found, but in this case family income and family harmony play a more important mediating role. Conclusion: The results suggest that it is not parental job loss per se that matters, but parents not being able to quickly find alternative employment. It is only children in families where joblessness is protracted and long-lasting who are at serious risk of long-term health problems. In sum, our results imply that the parental outcome that is most important for children's later health, and especially their mental health, is continuous paid employment. Such findings provide support for a jobs-first policy emphasis.
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ItemRefining national greenhouse gas inventories(SPRINGER, 2020-01-24)The importance of greenhouse gas inventories cannot be overstated: the process of producing inventories informs strategies that governments will use to meet emissions reduction targets. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) leads an effort to develop and refine internationally agreed upon methodologies for calculating and reporting greenhouse gas emissions and removals. We argue that these guidelines are not equipped to handle the task of developing national greenhouse gas inventories for most countries. Inventory guidelines are vital to implementing climate action, and we highlight opportunities to improve their timeliness and accuracy. Such reforms should provide the means to better understand and advance the progress countries are making toward their Paris commitments. Now is the time to consider challenges posed by the current process to develop the guidelines, and to avail the policy community of recent major advances in quantitative and expert synthesis to overhaul the process and thereby better equip multi-national efforts to limit climate change.
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ItemManaging pandemics as super wicked problems: lessons from, and for, COVID-19 and the climate crisis(SPRINGER, 2021-11-17)COVID-19 has caused 100s of millions of infections and millions of deaths worldwide, overwhelming health and economic capacities in many countries and at multiple scales. The immediacy and magnitude of this crisis has resulted in government officials, practitioners and applied scholars turning to reflexive learning exercises to generate insights for managing the reverberating effects of this disease as well as the next inevitable pandemic. We contribute to both tasks by assessing COVID-19 as a "super wicked" problem denoted by four features we originally formulated to describe the climate crisis: time is running out, no central authority, those causing the problem also want to solve it, and policies irrationally discount the future (Levin et al. in Playing it forward: path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the "super wicked" problem of global climate change, 2007; Levin et al. in Playing it forward: Path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the "super wicked" problem of global climate change, 2009; Levin et al. in Policy Sci 45(2):123-152, 2012). Doing so leads us to identify three overarching imperatives critical for pandemic management. First, similar to requirements to address the climate crisis, policy makers must establish and maintain durable policy objectives. Second, in contrast to climate, management responses must always allow for swift changes in policy settings and calibrations given rapid and evolving knowledge about a particular disease's epidemiology. Third, analogous to, but with swifter effects than climate, wide-ranging global efforts, if well designed, will dramatically reduce domestic costs and resource requirements by curbing the spread of the disease and/or fostering relevant knowledge for managing containment and eradication. Accomplishing these tasks requires building the analytic capacity for engaging in reflexive anticipatory policy design exercises aimed at maintaining, or building, life-saving thermostatic institutions at the global and domestic levels.
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ItemLiving Death at the Intersection of Necropower and Disciplinary Power: A Qualitative Exploration of Racialised and Detained Groups in Australia(SPRINGER, 2022-04-23)This article challenges state-sponsored violence in Australia by exploring the experiences of young Indigenous people in youth detention and refugees in immigration detention in Australia as a form of living death. This article examines how this living death manifests by qualitatively analysing publicly accessible first-hand accounts from Indigenous young people about their experiences of youth imprisonment and from refugees about their experiences of immigration detention onshore and offshore. The findings suggest that when necropower and disciplinary power intersect four overlapping expressions of violence emerge: structural violence, epistemic violence, physical violence and brutality, and disciplinary violence. It is the complex overlapping of these multiple forms of harm that creates an experience of living death. In privileging the voices of young Indigenous people and refugees, this article also recognises their continued refusal of past and present colonial structures and the associated violence of carceral spaces.
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ItemReflections on China's primary care response to COVID-19: roles, limitations and implications(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2022-08-05)This study focuses on the role of primary care in China's response to COVID-19. A retrospective, reflective approach was taken using data available to one of the authors who led the national community response to COVID-19, first in Wuhan and then multiple cities in ten provinces/municipalities across the country. At the peak of the pandemic, primary care providers shoulder various public health responsibilities and work in close partnerships with other key stakeholders in the local communities. Primary care providers keep playing a 'sentinel'/surveillance role in identifying re-emerging cases after the elimination of community transmissions of COVID-19. Critically, however, the pandemic once again highlights some key limitations of the primary care sector, including the lack of gatekeeping, limited capacity and weak integration between medical care and public health.
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ItemSending a message: The Australian's reporting of media policy(SAGE, 2015-11-01)As Australia's only national general newspaper, with an elite ‘political class’ audience, The Australian has been at the forefront of newspaper proprietors' attempts to influence media policy. This article analyses The Australian's reporting of two key media policy proposals affecting newspapers: the establishment of the Australian Press Council in 1975–76 and the Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation (the Finkelstein inquiry) in 2012–13. While the events were 36 years apart, the paper's stance and rhetoric were remarkably similar. However, its approach to journalism and to providing information to its audience changed in several important respects.
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ItemNews Corporation Tabloids and Press Photography During the 2013 Australian Federal Election(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2017)Academic attention has often been focused upon analysing words in journalism texts and, consequently, the impact of photographs in newspaper journalism has tended to be overlooked. This is problematic because images are a key method by which news is selected, framed and communicated, particularly in tabloid newspapers. This article focuses upon criticisms that tabloids from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation Australia were biased—against the Kevin Rudd-led Labor government and towards Tony Abbott’s conservative Liberal–National Coalition—during the 2013 federal election in Australia. Through an analysis of front pages, this article explores how photographs contributed to reporting the campaign and expressing the strong political preferences of News Corporation. The article concludes that Murdoch’s Australian tabloids shifted towards a British-style overt partisanship in their reporting of the 2013 election. Images were at the forefront of that shift as they are a powerful tool for conveying messages of newspaper support and opposition, and occupy a central place in how political issues, events and individuals are represented and understood.
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ItemPress Photography and Visual Censorship in the Australian Parliament(WILEY, 2018-03-01)Still photography is an important medium for visually communicating — and scrutinising — the power of elected representatives. However, it has been severely restricted by parliaments. Surprisingly, the photographs taken by press photographers have been viewed as a larger threat to parliamentary dignity than other seemingly more powerful media, such as television. This article analyses parliaments’ “extraordinary sensitivity to photography” by conducting a comparative, historical examination of press photography in five national parliaments — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The article discusses historical milestones in media access for each of these parliaments, but focuses particularly upon the unusual case of the Australian Parliament and its rules on still photography. The author draws upon interviews conducted with Australian press photographers, as well as an analysis of primary material — including parliamentary guidelines on media access, photographs, newspaper reports, parliamentary debates, inquiry reports and submissions.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Hope Burden: Envisioning a better world is hard work, even when you’re young(Sociological Review Foundation, 2022-04-05)