Suchergebnisse

The election of the Kennett government in 1992 heralded an era of unprecedented change in public sector employment and industrial relations in Victoria. The Employee Relations Act 1992 and the Public Sector Management Act 1992 redefined the public sector in Victoria and the relationship, both collective and individual, of public sector employees with government. In October 1999 the Kennett government unexpectedly lost office. But despite its pre‐election rhetoric promising a return to more conventional arrangements, there is little indication that the Bracks government intends to significantly dismantle the Kennett legacy in public sector employment and industrial relations.

Front Matter -- Contents -- Introduction /Deirdre O'Neill and Mike Wayne -- Part 1: Class Theory -- Class and the Classical Marxist Tradition /Joseph Choonara -- Social Class and Education /Dave Hill -- Marxist Class Theory: Competition, Contingency and Intermediate Class Positions /Jonathan Pratschke -- Class Segregation /Danny Dorling -- The 'Secret' of the Restoration: Increased Class Exploitation /Maurizio Donato and Roberto Taddeo -- Exploitation, Oppression, and Epistemology /Holly Lewis -- Part 2: Class and Culture -- Peasants, Migrants and Self-Employed Workers: The Masks that Veil Class Affiliation in Latin America: The Argentine Case /Marina Kabat and Eduardo Sartelli -- Capitalism, Class and Collective Identity: Social Movements and Public Services in South Africa /Adrian Murray -- On Intellectuals /Deirdre O'Neill and Mike Wayne -- The British Working Class Post-Blair Consensus: We Do Not Exist /Lisa Mckenzie -- From Class Solidarity to Cultural Solidarity: Immigration, Crises, and the Populist Right /Ferruh Yılmaz -- Recovering the Australian Working Class /Tony Moore , Mark Gibson and Catharine Lumby -- Part 4: Class and the Media -- 'Everything Changes. Everything Stays the Same': Documenting Continuity and Change in Working Class Lives /Anita Biressi -- Ghettos and Gated Communities in the Social Landscape of Television: Representations of Class in 1982 and 2015 /Fredrik Stiernstedt and Peter Jakobsson -- Class, Culture and Exploitation: The Case of Reality tv /Milly Williamson -- Class Warfare, the Neoliberal Man and the Political Economy of Methamphetamine in Breaking Bad /Michael Seltzer -- 'The Thing Is I'm Actually from Bromley': Queer/Class Intersectionality in Pride (2014) /Craig Haslop.

Cover -- Contents -- List of Boxes, Figures and Tables -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- 1 Business, Government and Globalization -- 2 The Role of Business -- 3 The Role of Government -- 4 Regulation -- 5 Competition Policy -- 6 Competitiveness -- 7 Trade policy -- 8 Protectionism -- 9 The Environment -- 10 Globalization and Internationalization -- References -- Index.

This essay reflects critically on the political context, production process, ideas, and strategies of our feature‐length documentary film The Condition of the Working Class. It explores why we were inspired by Friedrich Engels' 1844 book of the same name and how that book connects with the contemporary neoliberal capitalist project that has dominated the political scene internationally for several decades. We conceptualize our film as a constellation, in the manner of Walter Benjamin, between the 1840s and the contemporary moment. The essay explores the production process of the film, which involved setting up and working in conjunction with a theatrical project. The essay reflects on the theatrical work of John McGrath and its connections with our own work. In the final section of the essay, the authors consider the finished film in more detail, analyzing how the film focused on the process of theatrical production and contextualized that process within wider spatial and temporal frames. The film and the theater project explore the possibility of reconstituting in a microcosm a working class collective subject that has been atomized and demonized by 30 years of neoliberal policy, which in the context of the present economic crisis seeks to drive its project even further.

The Report on Government Services (RoGS) to the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) is considered an exemplar of benchmarking in a federal system. Published annually since 1997, RoGS provides performance reporting in the form of cross jurisdictional benchmarking on an unprecedented scale and scope. This paper argues ROGS has institutionalised a national approach to performance measurement and reporting that is now at the centre of the COAG reform agenda. The paper examines the processes and institutional structures that explain how RoGS has transformed performance reporting for social infrastructure services. The final section provides a preliminary assessment of the impact of RoGS.

AbstractRoyal commissions are established at the Commonwealth and state levels in Australia to investigate matters of significant public concern. These distinctive entities are highly respected both by government and the community. They are typically expected to produce reports that will have significant impact. Although a large number are created primarily to determine why specific events happened and where accountabilities lie, many are expected to generate findings and recommendations that will lead to policy change. We review common strategies that actors in and around government deploy with the purpose of shaping public policy. This leads to an exploration of the influence strategies deployed by three Australian royal commissions that achieved high levels of policy impact. Lessons are drawn for how future royal commissions might create policy legacies that deliver high public value.

Once regarded as core public sector business, Australia's prisons were reformed during the 1990s and Australia now has the highest proportion of prisoners in privately managed prisons in the world. How could this have happened? This article presents a case study of the State of Victoria and explains how public–private partnerships (P3s) were used to create a mixed public–private prison system. Despite the difficulty of determining clear and rigorous evaluation results, we argue that lessons from the Victorian experience are possible. First, neither the extreme fears of policy critics nor the grandiose policy and technical promises of reformers were fully met. Second, short-term success was achieved in political and policy terms by the delivery of badly needed new prisons. Third, the exact degree to which the state has achieved cheaper, better, and more accountable prison services remains contested. As a consequence, there is a need to continue experimentation but with greater transparency.

AbstractTwenty‐five years after the Kennett government began privatising prisons, Victoria has the world's highest proportion of prisoners in private prisons. When the privatisation project began, it was confidently expected that privately managed prisons would be cheaper, better, and more accountable than traditional public sector provision. This paper examines whether those anticipated benefits have been realised. In doing so, we assess system‐wide operating costs, specific measures of performance, and accountability of the prison system between 1992 and 2017. Using publicly available data, we conclude temporary lower costs occurred but have not been sustained. Similarly, performance improvements are mixed, and enhanced accountability is contested. Although the performance information now available on Victoria's prisons is superior to what was available in the pre‐privatisation era, successive Victorian governments have also overseen arrangements that severely curtail dissemination of such data. This has restricted the capacity of Parliament and the public not only to hold government to account for the operations of the prison system, but also to evaluate the efficacy and impact of the prisons privatisation project. We conclude a more definitive assessment will only be possible when current limitations on accessing performance and other data are lifted enabling greater public scrutiny of Victoria's prison system.