Linda Courtenay Botterill
Biographic Data
| ID | 287407 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Linda Courtenay Botterill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Linda Courtenay |
| FAMILY NAME | Botterill |
| SIGNATURE | BOTTERILL L C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Canberra |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6060-5090 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 172 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
In some ways it's our best quality and in others it's our downfall: The need for more reflective use of the word ‘resilience’ to describe Australian farmers
‘Resilience’ has become a buzzword in various sectors in Australia and beyond. Its widespread use in policy discussions reflects its perceived importance in relation to addressing challenges such as mental health and drought management. This research highlights the overuse of the term ‘resilience’ and the pressures that its use places on individual farmers, using findings from thematic analysis of focus groups and surveys conducted with women inv…
Avoiding the brakes: Malign policy and legal advice in the Robodebt scandal
Robodebt, a welfare compliance scheme that issued illegitimate debts to more than 500,000 welfare recipients, is among the most prominent examples of malign policymaking in recent Australian history. In this article, we seek to understand how the Australian Government came to implement a scheme that was in clear violation of social security law, focusing specifically on the role of legal advice. Legal advice can play an important role in policy d…
Ignoring harm, saving face: Non-knowledge, senior public servants and the Robodebt scheme
An Examination of the Policy Content of Scott Morrison's and Anthony Albanese's 2022 Federal Election Campaign Materials
This Research Note reports on an analysis of the speeches, media releases, opinion pieces, and transcripts of the utterances of both major party leaders, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, during the 2022 federal election campaign. We undertake a reflexive thematic analysis of these documents to identify the key messages of the two campaigns
The values dimension of policy success and failure: Considering two Australian rural adjustment policies
In 1992, Australia introduced a National Drought Policy comprising a number of policies each focused on achieving a common goal of a self‐reliant, productive farm sector capable of managing the challenges of climate variability. This paper considers two of these policies, one of which has been an acknowledged success and the other that is generally regarded as a failure. The paper assesses these schemes against the criteria proposed by Luetjens e…
Thematic analysis using the Schwartz values theory: Exploring the use of values appeals in persuasive speech during Covid-19 in Australia
The Schwartz theory of personal values has been used extensively, and almost exclusively quantitatively, by researchers to increase understanding of the impact of values on human behaviour. While it provides a well-tested methodology and common language, the approach has been limited by its reliance on survey work, in which the researcher asks participants questions of interest, and then correlates these with respondents’ self-reporting of their …
Exploring domains of contemporary Australian agrarianism
The idealisation of rural work, people, and communities is remarkably persistent in Western countries. With the diminishing role of agriculture in national economies and changing values, this agrarian sentiment could be expected to lose currency. Yet, agrarian tropes and narratives remain evident in popular culture, political discourse, and public policy. Flinn and Johnson, in the 1970s, pioneered empirical studies of agrarianism based on a regio…
The role of ‘non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: A proposal and agenda for future research
Background: Recent complex and cross-boundary policy problems, such as climate change, pandemics, and financial crises, have recentred debates about state capacity, democratic discontent and the ‘crisis of expertise’. These problems are contested and open to redefinition, misunderstanding, spin, and deception, challenging the ability of policymakers to locate, discriminate, comprehend, and respond to competing sources of knowledge and expertise. …
Factors affecting public responses to health messages during the Covid-19 pandemic in Australia: Partisanship, Values, and Source Credibility
The COVID-19 crisis highlighted issues of trust in government and experts, as citizens were asked to accept restrictions on liberties in order to slow the spread of the virus. Based on a survey of 1992 Australians conducted in May 2020, this paper reports on the attitudes of Australians toward the responses of their State and Federal governments to the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, we found support for government responses differed with partisan alig…
Initiative‐Resistance and the Australian Party System
In the first half of the twentieth century, writing about Australian political parties was strongly influenced by the novelty of government — and the policy agenda — being led by the political arm of organised labour. This was reflected in the tendency for commentators to treat Labor as the driving force in Australian politics and policy, and to see non‐Labor as playing a predominantly reactive and oppositional role. Following strong criticism, t…
Expanding the Political Psychology Toolkit: The Potential of Discursive Psychology for Understanding Contentious Political Debate at a Grassroots Level
In its location at the intersection of political science and psychology, political psychology draws on many of the research techniques of both disciplines in its exploration of power, voting behavior, leadership, attitudes, and values. One hitherto relatively underutilized approach for understanding public policy debate is discursive psychology (DP). Applying this perspective to a contentious policy issue in Australia, we seek to demonstrate that…
Contesting facts about wind farms in Australia and the legitimacy of adverse health effects
The development of wind energy in Australia has been subject to ongoing public debate and has been characterised by concerns over the health impacts of wind turbines. Using discursive psychology, we examine 'wind turbine syndrome' as a contested illness and analyse how people build and undermine divergent arguments about wind-farm health effects. This article explores two facets of the dispute. First, we consider how participants construct 'facts…
Identifying and measuring agrarian sentiment in regional Australia
Agricultural policy in Australia: Deregulation, Bipartisanship and Agrarian Sentiment
This paper provides an overview of the development of agricultural policy in Australia from a complex web of government intervention in the sector in the first half of the 20th century to the deregulation of the past 40 years. It highlights the close interrelationship between agricultural policy and manufacturing policy as well as the areas in which agricultural policy has been distinctive, namely the largely bipartisan nature of agricultural pol…
From “Unstable” to “Stable” Minority Government: Reflections on the Role of the Nationals in Federal Coalition Governments
In contrast to some other jurisdictions, in Australia, governments relying on minor parties and independents to enact policies and especially to hold power, are readily characterised by oppositions and commentators as unstable, even chaotic and an undesirable deviation from the stability of majority parliaments. The almost unremarked exception is the Liberals' long and frequent reliance on the National Party and its predecessors to form governmen…
Commensalistic institutions and value conflicts: The World Trade Organization and global private food standards
An important outcome of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations was the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement). This was set up to discipline the use of national food safety and animal and plant health regulations and to prevent their emergence as technical barriers to trade. The Agreement privileges free trade and scientific evidence, thus excluding many ethical considerations from the re…
Patrick Weller's contribution to Australian political science
The craft of governing, a collection of essays edited by Glyn Davis and R.A.W. Rhodes, pays fitting tribute to Patrick Weller, one of Australia's distinguished political scientists. It brings toget
Are Policy Entrepreneurs Really Decisive in Achieving Policy Change? Drought Policy in the USA and Australia
In his work on policy development, John Kingdon discusses the role of “policy entrepreneurs” in advocating particular solutions to policy problems. This article discusses a group of policy entrepreneurs in the US who have been actively seeking to shift drought policy away from a crisis response towards an approach based on risk management. The case is discussed by comparison with the development of Australian drought policy which has taken a risk…
The Multiple Meanings of ‘Resilience’: An Overview of the Literature
‘resilience is in danger of becoming a vacuous buzzword from overuse and ambiguity’ (Rose 2007: 384) ‘ Resilience’ is widely used in public policy debate in Australia in contexts as diverse as drought policy, mental fitness in the Australian Defence Force, and in discussion around the Australian economy's performance during the global financial crisis. The following paper provides an overview of the use of the term ‘resilience’ in the academic li…
Rural and Regional Policy: A Case of Punctuated Incrementalism
The rural policy environment has many of the conditions that might suggest a tendency towards punctuated equilibrium. The Commonwealth has little direct power over rural space and industries, there has been a long tradition of state support for agriculture and decision‐making has generally been kept within a tight policy community, dominated by rural interests. In our review of the PAP data and policy history, we find instead an underlying moveme…
The evolution of rural policy: The Antipodean experience
In common with other countries in the developed world, Australia and New Zealand developed an array of institutions and programs from the 1950s to the 1970s to support their agricultural sectors. From the mid-1980s they dismantled these, very rapidly in the case of New Zealand, to leave farmers and rural regions largely to market forces. This article explores the transition in Australia and New Zealand from agricultural policy based on ‘protected…
Ethical food standard schemes and global trade: Paralleling the WTO
Global food trade embodies a range of different interpretations of the nature of food and its role in society. On the one hand, the WTO food regulation regime, in particular the SPS agreement, is based upon a somewhat instrumental value of food consumption in which food is seen as a commodity to be traded in accordance with international trade rules. At the same time, a number of private standards, such as GlobalG.A.P and various organic standard…
Turtles all the way down: Bounded rationality in an evidence-based age
Evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) has become both a catch-cry and aspiration of governments. Drawing on 'the evidence', governments seek to focus on 'what works' and so avoid the pitfalls of policy driven by ideology or values. Critics of EBPM remind us that the policy process remains messy and uncertain and that while research may deliver the latest scientific evidence, it is not always translated effectively into policy. We argue that the pro…
Signs of Countrymindedness: A Survey of Attitudes to Rural Industries and People
Some political scientists have argued that ‘countrymindedness’, a set of tenets about the importance of agriculture and rural life, is of decreasing political and social importance. There has been little empirical research to test this, so the authors conducted an exploratory survey of attitudes to rural industries and people. The results reveal that there are some differences in attitudes according to age, location, country of birth and voting i…
Engaging with private sector standards: A case study of GLOBALG.A.P
There is now a fairly substantial literature on private global business regulation which focuses on the rise of non-governmental and private regulatory systems alongside traditional state-based systems. These private systems cross national borders and impact on international trade which, in the intergovernmental realm, is governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In this article, the authors argue that while in principle privat…
Policy change and network termination: The role of farm groups in agricultural policy making in Australia
As the National Farmers' Federation (NFF) celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2004, it is timely to reflect on the role of farm groups in agricultural policy making in Australia and revisit the policy changes of the 1970s which provided a major impetus for the NFF's formation. Agricultural policy is often presented as the classic case of policy developed by tight policy communities characterised by stability, shared ideology and limited membership…
The Multiple Meanings of ‘Resilience’: An Overview of the Literature
‘resilience is in danger of becoming a vacuous buzzword from overuse and ambiguity’ (Rose 2007: 384) ‘ Resilience’ is widely used in public policy debate in Australia in contexts as diverse as drought policy, mental fitness in the Australian Defence Force, and in discussion around the Australian economy's performance during the global financial crisis. The following paper provides an overview of the use of the term ‘resilience’ in the academic li…
Signs of Countrymindedness: A Survey of Attitudes to Rural Industries and People
Some political scientists have argued that ‘countrymindedness’, a set of tenets about the importance of agriculture and rural life, is of decreasing political and social importance. There has been little empirical research to test this, so the authors conducted an exploratory survey of attitudes to rural industries and people. The results reveal that there are some differences in attitudes according to age, location, country of birth and voting i…
Turtles all the way down: Bounded rationality in an evidence-based age
Evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) has become both a catch-cry and aspiration of governments. Drawing on 'the evidence', governments seek to focus on 'what works' and so avoid the pitfalls of policy driven by ideology or values. Critics of EBPM remind us that the policy process remains messy and uncertain and that while research may deliver the latest scientific evidence, it is not always translated effectively into policy. We argue that the pro…
Agricultural policy in Australia: Deregulation, Bipartisanship and Agrarian Sentiment
This paper provides an overview of the development of agricultural policy in Australia from a complex web of government intervention in the sector in the first half of the 20th century to the deregulation of the past 40 years. It highlights the close interrelationship between agricultural policy and manufacturing policy as well as the areas in which agricultural policy has been distinctive, namely the largely bipartisan nature of agricultural pol…
Life and Death of an Institution: The Case of Collective Wheat Marketing in Australia
Since the 1980s, there has been renewed interest among political scientists in the role of institutions. An important strand of this ‘new institutionalism’ is historical institutionalism. Recent theoretical developments have sought to address the most obvious criticisms of the historical institutionalist approach, particularly the critique relating to its tendency to focus on explanations of stability. However, the institutional histories under c…
Commensalistic institutions and value conflicts: The World Trade Organization and global private food standards
An important outcome of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations was the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement). This was set up to discipline the use of national food safety and animal and plant health regulations and to prevent their emergence as technical barriers to trade. The Agreement privileges free trade and scientific evidence, thus excluding many ethical considerations from the re…
From Disaster Response to Risk Management: Australia's National Drought Policy (Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research)
Identifying and measuring agrarian sentiment in regional Australia
Policy Fiascos, Blame Management and AWB Limited: The Howard Government's Escape from the Iraq Wheat Scandal
In 1999, the Australian government privatised the statutory Australian Wheat Board and created AWB Limited, transferring the Board's assets and its export monopoly to a grower-controlled company. In 2000, allegations surfaced that AWB Limited had made payments to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime in order to secure lucrative wheat exports worth $500 million per annum. Such actions violated the terms of the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme and b…
Responding to Farm Poverty in Australia
In May 2005, the Commonwealth announced changes to the eligibility criteria for a number of farm welfare payments which have resulted in farmers receiving such payments on more generous terms than other disadvantaged groups in the community. The changes passed largely unremarked by the media or political commentators. Farm welfare programs are developed independently of the general welfare safety net and are based on assumptions about the nature,…
Rural Adjustment Schemes: Juggling Politics, Welfare and Markets
The Commonwealth government has offered support to farmers in the form of structural or business adjustment‐type schemes since the Loan (Farmers Debt Adjustment) Acts of 1935–1971. Since 1971, a series of more comprehensive rural reconstruction/adjustment schemes with a range of objectives from debt alleviation to encouraging some exits from agricultural industries, has been in place. While having little direct impact on the structure of these in…
Rural and Regional Policy: A Case of Punctuated Incrementalism
The rural policy environment has many of the conditions that might suggest a tendency towards punctuated equilibrium. The Commonwealth has little direct power over rural space and industries, there has been a long tradition of state support for agriculture and decision‐making has generally been kept within a tight policy community, dominated by rural interests. In our review of the PAP data and policy history, we find instead an underlying moveme…
Doing it for the Growers in Iraq: The AWB, Oil‐for‐Food and the Cole Inquiry
Thematic analysis using the Schwartz values theory: Exploring the use of values appeals in persuasive speech during Covid-19 in Australia
The Schwartz theory of personal values has been used extensively, and almost exclusively quantitatively, by researchers to increase understanding of the impact of values on human behaviour. While it provides a well-tested methodology and common language, the approach has been limited by its reliance on survey work, in which the researcher asks participants questions of interest, and then correlates these with respondents’ self-reporting of their …
Factors affecting public responses to health messages during the Covid-19 pandemic in Australia: Partisanship, Values, and Source Credibility
The COVID-19 crisis highlighted issues of trust in government and experts, as citizens were asked to accept restrictions on liberties in order to slow the spread of the virus. Based on a survey of 1992 Australians conducted in May 2020, this paper reports on the attitudes of Australians toward the responses of their State and Federal governments to the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, we found support for government responses differed with partisan alig…
Laying the Foundations for the Wheat Scandal: UN Sanctions, Private Actors and the Cole Inquiry
Throughout 2006, Commissioner Terence Cole QC conducted an inquiry into the involvement of Australian companies in the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme in Iraq. The inquiry generated headlines about sanctions-busting behaviour on the part of AWB Limited and whether or not government ministers knew or should have known what was happening during the life of the Programme from 1996 to 2003. An element of the scandal that has received little at…
Valuing Agriculture: Balancing Competing Objectives in the Policy Process
In an era of increasing emphasis on free trade and market deregulation, agricultural policy in advanced industrialized countries remains an anomaly, with many countries continuing to intervene in markets for farm produce. Since the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations the scrutiny of these interventions has made clear that governments have a range of objectives for their agricultural policies, some unrelated to economic factors. Conce…
Government Responses to Farm Poverty: The policy development process
Additional informationNotes on contributorsLinda BotterillLinda Botterill is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Australian National University. Prior to returning to full time study to undertake research into rural policy, Ms Botterill spent over a decade in public policy development, including working in the Rural Policy Branch of the then Department of Primary Industries and Energy and in the Offices of both Simon Cre…
The role of ‘non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: A proposal and agenda for future research
Background: Recent complex and cross-boundary policy problems, such as climate change, pandemics, and financial crises, have recentred debates about state capacity, democratic discontent and the ‘crisis of expertise’. These problems are contested and open to redefinition, misunderstanding, spin, and deception, challenging the ability of policymakers to locate, discriminate, comprehend, and respond to competing sources of knowledge and expertise. …
Engaging with private sector standards: A case study of GLOBALG.A.P
There is now a fairly substantial literature on private global business regulation which focuses on the rise of non-governmental and private regulatory systems alongside traditional state-based systems. These private systems cross national borders and impact on international trade which, in the intergovernmental realm, is governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In this article, the authors argue that while in principle privat…
Leaps of Faith in the Obesity Debate: A Cautionary Note for Policy Note for Policy‐makers
The obesity epidemic has become an issue of major public concern in recent years, with dire predictions of its impact on public health budgets and the long‐term health of populations in the developed world. Governments are being urged to act to improve our eating habits and make us more active. Policy proposals range from education campaigns to banning junk food advertising to more extreme measures such as ‘fat taxes’. Although the debate has inc…
Rural Policy Assumptions and Policy Failure: The Case of the Re‐establishment Grant
For 30 years successive Commonwealth governments have offered grants to encourage marginal farmers to quit farming. The grants have increased in generosity over time but there has only ever been a limited uptake of the program. This paper considers the assumptions policy‐makers have made about farmers’ behaviour in formulating these programs and compares these with sociological evidence about farmers’ incentive structures. This case study provide…
Expanding the Political Psychology Toolkit: The Potential of Discursive Psychology for Understanding Contentious Political Debate at a Grassroots Level
In its location at the intersection of political science and psychology, political psychology draws on many of the research techniques of both disciplines in its exploration of power, voting behavior, leadership, attitudes, and values. One hitherto relatively underutilized approach for understanding public policy debate is discursive psychology (DP). Applying this perspective to a contentious policy issue in Australia, we seek to demonstrate that…
The evolution of rural policy: The Antipodean experience
In common with other countries in the developed world, Australia and New Zealand developed an array of institutions and programs from the 1950s to the 1970s to support their agricultural sectors. From the mid-1980s they dismantled these, very rapidly in the case of New Zealand, to leave farmers and rural regions largely to market forces. This article explores the transition in Australia and New Zealand from agricultural policy based on ‘protected…
Government Responses to Farm Poverty: The policy development process
Additional informationNotes on contributorsLinda BotterillLinda Botterill is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Australian National University. Prior to returning to full time study to undertake research into rural policy, Ms Botterill spent over a decade in public policy development, including working in the Rural Policy Branch of the then Department of Primary Industries and Energy and in the Offices of both Simon Cre…
Rural Policy Assumptions and Policy Failure: The Case of the Re‐establishment Grant
For 30 years successive Commonwealth governments have offered grants to encourage marginal farmers to quit farming. The grants have increased in generosity over time but there has only ever been a limited uptake of the program. This paper considers the assumptions policy‐makers have made about farmers’ behaviour in formulating these programs and compares these with sociological evidence about farmers’ incentive structures. This case study provide…
Uncertain Climate: The Recent History of Drought Policy in Australia
In 2002 Australia experienced widespread drought, with over 70 per cent of the country experiencing serious to severe rainfall deficiencies for the period April to October. During this period images of parched landscapes were frequently shown on television, and the Farm Hand drought appeal launched, with the backing of business, to raise funds to assist drought–affected farmers. Since 1992, Australia has had in place a National Drought Policy bas…
An income‐related loans proposal for drought relief for farm businesses
In 2004 the Commonwealth government is undertaking a review of its drought policy. This follows expenditure in excess of $1 billion on drought relief during 2002 and 2003 and comes only a decade after similarly large expenditure on support for farmers during the drought of the 1990s. Drought support for farm businesses has been provided within the framework of the National Drought Policy (NDP) agreed by Commonwealth and state governments in 1992 …
Valuing Agriculture: Balancing Competing Objectives in the Policy Process
In an era of increasing emphasis on free trade and market deregulation, agricultural policy in advanced industrialized countries remains an anomaly, with many countries continuing to intervene in markets for farm produce. Since the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations the scrutiny of these interventions has made clear that governments have a range of objectives for their agricultural policies, some unrelated to economic factors. Conce…
From Disaster Response to Risk Management: Australia's National Drought Policy (Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research)
Policy change and network termination: The role of farm groups in agricultural policy making in Australia
As the National Farmers' Federation (NFF) celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2004, it is timely to reflect on the role of farm groups in agricultural policy making in Australia and revisit the policy changes of the 1970s which provided a major impetus for the NFF's formation. Agricultural policy is often presented as the classic case of policy developed by tight policy communities characterised by stability, shared ideology and limited membership…
Rural Adjustment Schemes: Juggling Politics, Welfare and Markets
The Commonwealth government has offered support to farmers in the form of structural or business adjustment‐type schemes since the Loan (Farmers Debt Adjustment) Acts of 1935–1971. Since 1971, a series of more comprehensive rural reconstruction/adjustment schemes with a range of objectives from debt alleviation to encouraging some exits from agricultural industries, has been in place. While having little direct impact on the structure of these in…
Leaps of Faith in the Obesity Debate: A Cautionary Note for Policy Note for Policy‐makers
The obesity epidemic has become an issue of major public concern in recent years, with dire predictions of its impact on public health budgets and the long‐term health of populations in the developed world. Governments are being urged to act to improve our eating habits and make us more active. Policy proposals range from education campaigns to banning junk food advertising to more extreme measures such as ‘fat taxes’. Although the debate has inc…
Doing it for the Growers in Iraq: The AWB, Oil‐for‐Food and the Cole Inquiry
Managing Intergovernmental Relations in Australia: The Case of Agricultural Policy Cooperation
In June 2004, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) announced changes to the guidelines and protocols of some 40 ministerial councils and intergovernmental fora which comprise the web of intergovernmental consultative arrangements. This article examines the impact of the guidelines on the operation of the oldest of the sectoral ministerial councils, those relating to agriculture. The COAG guidelines aim to increase the strategic focus of t…
Responding to Farm Poverty in Australia
In May 2005, the Commonwealth announced changes to the eligibility criteria for a number of farm welfare payments which have resulted in farmers receiving such payments on more generous terms than other disadvantaged groups in the community. The changes passed largely unremarked by the media or political commentators. Farm welfare programs are developed independently of the general welfare safety net and are based on assumptions about the nature,…
Laying the Foundations for the Wheat Scandal: UN Sanctions, Private Actors and the Cole Inquiry
Throughout 2006, Commissioner Terence Cole QC conducted an inquiry into the involvement of Australian companies in the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme in Iraq. The inquiry generated headlines about sanctions-busting behaviour on the part of AWB Limited and whether or not government ministers knew or should have known what was happening during the life of the Programme from 1996 to 2003. An element of the scandal that has received little at…
Policy Fiascos, Blame Management and AWB Limited: The Howard Government's Escape from the Iraq Wheat Scandal
In 1999, the Australian government privatised the statutory Australian Wheat Board and created AWB Limited, transferring the Board's assets and its export monopoly to a grower-controlled company. In 2000, allegations surfaced that AWB Limited had made payments to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime in order to secure lucrative wheat exports worth $500 million per annum. Such actions violated the terms of the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme and b…
Life and Death of an Institution: The Case of Collective Wheat Marketing in Australia
Since the 1980s, there has been renewed interest among political scientists in the role of institutions. An important strand of this ‘new institutionalism’ is historical institutionalism. Recent theoretical developments have sought to address the most obvious criticisms of the historical institutionalist approach, particularly the critique relating to its tendency to focus on explanations of stability. However, the institutional histories under c…
Engaging with private sector standards: A case study of GLOBALG.A.P
There is now a fairly substantial literature on private global business regulation which focuses on the rise of non-governmental and private regulatory systems alongside traditional state-based systems. These private systems cross national borders and impact on international trade which, in the intergovernmental realm, is governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In this article, the authors argue that while in principle privat…
Back from the Brink? The National Party after the 2010 Federal Election
Despite increasing its share of votes and House of Representatives seats in the 2010 Federal Election, The National Party remains constrained by geography, identity, and Coalition with the Liberals. To illustrate these contentions, four aspects of the Nationals' position are analysed: where the Nationals hold seats; which ones have been lost and to which party over the last 36 years; the Coalition constraints on the Nationals' 2010 Election campa…
The evolution of rural policy: The Antipodean experience
In common with other countries in the developed world, Australia and New Zealand developed an array of institutions and programs from the 1950s to the 1970s to support their agricultural sectors. From the mid-1980s they dismantled these, very rapidly in the case of New Zealand, to leave farmers and rural regions largely to market forces. This article explores the transition in Australia and New Zealand from agricultural policy based on ‘protected…
Ethical food standard schemes and global trade: Paralleling the WTO
Global food trade embodies a range of different interpretations of the nature of food and its role in society. On the one hand, the WTO food regulation regime, in particular the SPS agreement, is based upon a somewhat instrumental value of food consumption in which food is seen as a commodity to be traded in accordance with international trade rules. At the same time, a number of private standards, such as GlobalG.A.P and various organic standard…
Turtles all the way down: Bounded rationality in an evidence-based age
Evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) has become both a catch-cry and aspiration of governments. Drawing on 'the evidence', governments seek to focus on 'what works' and so avoid the pitfalls of policy driven by ideology or values. Critics of EBPM remind us that the policy process remains messy and uncertain and that while research may deliver the latest scientific evidence, it is not always translated effectively into policy. We argue that the pro…
Signs of Countrymindedness: A Survey of Attitudes to Rural Industries and People
Some political scientists have argued that ‘countrymindedness’, a set of tenets about the importance of agriculture and rural life, is of decreasing political and social importance. There has been little empirical research to test this, so the authors conducted an exploratory survey of attitudes to rural industries and people. The results reveal that there are some differences in attitudes according to age, location, country of birth and voting i…
Are Policy Entrepreneurs Really Decisive in Achieving Policy Change? Drought Policy in the USA and Australia
In his work on policy development, John Kingdon discusses the role of “policy entrepreneurs” in advocating particular solutions to policy problems. This article discusses a group of policy entrepreneurs in the US who have been actively seeking to shift drought policy away from a crisis response towards an approach based on risk management. The case is discussed by comparison with the development of Australian drought policy which has taken a risk…
The Multiple Meanings of ‘Resilience’: An Overview of the Literature
‘resilience is in danger of becoming a vacuous buzzword from overuse and ambiguity’ (Rose 2007: 384) ‘ Resilience’ is widely used in public policy debate in Australia in contexts as diverse as drought policy, mental fitness in the Australian Defence Force, and in discussion around the Australian economy's performance during the global financial crisis. The following paper provides an overview of the use of the term ‘resilience’ in the academic li…
Rural and Regional Policy: A Case of Punctuated Incrementalism
The rural policy environment has many of the conditions that might suggest a tendency towards punctuated equilibrium. The Commonwealth has little direct power over rural space and industries, there has been a long tradition of state support for agriculture and decision‐making has generally been kept within a tight policy community, dominated by rural interests. In our review of the PAP data and policy history, we find instead an underlying moveme…
From “Unstable” to “Stable” Minority Government: Reflections on the Role of the Nationals in Federal Coalition Governments
In contrast to some other jurisdictions, in Australia, governments relying on minor parties and independents to enact policies and especially to hold power, are readily characterised by oppositions and commentators as unstable, even chaotic and an undesirable deviation from the stability of majority parliaments. The almost unremarked exception is the Liberals' long and frequent reliance on the National Party and its predecessors to form governmen…
Political science (37 works) · Economics (28 works) · Law (27 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (20 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Agriculture (13 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Public Administration (13 works) · Rural development and sustainability (13 works)