Leading Issues
Interviews
This
section features current issues of significance that need further investigation
and are therefore pursued by CLW through interviews with experts on that
particular issue. Papers related to the issue will also be featured in
this section.
Topics include:
Journalism
Politics
Democracy
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Project for Excellence in Journalism
in the US
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Amy S. Mitchell
Deputy Director, Project for Excellence in Journalism, USA
Amy S. Mitchell is Deputy Director for the Project for Excellence in
Journalism. She has been with the Project since its inception in 1997.
Her primary focus is creating and managing
the Project’s research, including the Annual Report on the State of the
News Media as well as other more specific studies of the news media. She
also works on the Project’s teaching instruments including editing a
case study curriculum for journalism teaching, titled Case Studies in
Journalistic Decision Making. Prior to this occupation, Ms. Mitchell was
a congressional research associate at the American Enterprise Institute
where she researched public policy and its relationship with the press,
the public and government. While at AEI, she co-authored several
articles and contributed to books including Debt & Taxes and
Vital Statistics on Congress.
Ms. Mitchell also spent two years working in
the publishing industry and is a graduate of
Georgetown
University.
Originally from the mid-West, she now lives
in
Silver Spring, MD with her
husband and three children.
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Donations to
Political Parties
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Dr Graeme
Orr
Graeme Orr
is an Associate Professor in the law school at the
University of Queensland.
He has researched and commented on the rules regulating politics,
parties and elections for the past decade.
Interview with Dr Graeme Orr |
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Articles/Papers by other
authors
Political Funding:
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In the wake
of the
Prime
Minister
John Howard's
admission that he
would
welcome donations to the Liberal Party from Gunns, the company behind
the proposed Tasmanian pulp mill, Ken Coghill (Monash University) has an
article
on the ABC’s website on the shortcomings of the regulation of political
finance in Australia.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/11/2056377.htm
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‘Be honest, Minister!’ Restoring faith in
government in
Australia
At the
request of the authors, we are making the report of the Australasian
Study of Parliament (ASPG) Accountability Working Group’s report,
‘Be honest, Minister!’
Restoring faith in government in Australia,
available on the Audit website. The report recommends codifying
ministerial responsibility, strengthening FOI, regulating lobbying, the
establishment of a Parliamentary Standards Commission, and establishing
independent Parliamentary Presiding Officers.
http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au/misc/aspgbehonestminister.pdf
Lobbying
The lobbying
industry—Time to regulate:
Julian
Fitzgerald considers the regulation of political lobbyists in this new
Audit paper. He argues that a registration scheme would alleviate some
of the problems that this burgeoning industry has brought.
http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au/papers/20070920fitz_lobbying.pdf
Political Advertising
Government
advertising on industrial relations:
Fred Argy, visiting fellow at ANU’s Crawford School, reviews the federal government’s
publicly funded, multi-million dollar campaign to persuade the
Australian electorate of the merits of the controversial WorkChoices
policy.
http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au/papers/20071102argy_govt_ir_ads.pdf
The Right to Vote
The right to vote is not enjoyed equally:
A
recent report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
(HREOC) shows that, whilst all Australians aged 18 or over are
supposedly obliged to vote, in fact certain groups are
disproportionately more likely to miss out. Those with a disability,
those in rural areas, indigenous Australians, the homeless, and
prisoners serving sentences longer than three years, are all likely to
excluded from voting for legal or practical reasons.
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News related to Political funding issues:
NSW
Election Funding Inquiry
The NSW Legislative
Council has set up (27 June) a select committee to inquire into
the funding and disclosure of donations to political parties and
candidates in State and local government elections. The inquiry was
moved by Liberal MP Don Harwin, with the support of the Greens, the
Shooters Party and the Christian Democratic Party. The inquiry
will look at the impact of donations on the democratic process and the
advantages and disadvantages of a ban on corporate and union donations
and of introducing expenditure limits. It will report by the first
sitting day in March 2008. There has been continuing controversy in NSW
over developer donations and their potential impact on planning laws and
planning decisions.
Election
funding in New Zealand
Andrew Geddis / Democratic Audit of
Australia
This paper reviews New Zealand's system of election funding in the light
of the 2005 election. A series of serious breaches of the rules by
several parties have been documented, but with little prospect of
punishment. Enforcement of the rules is weak, with breaches treated as
'victimless crimes'. However, such continued breaches risk undermining
the legitimacy of the whole electoral process.
UK
party funding
The report of
Sir Hayden Phillips’ review of party funding in the UK was
published in March 2007. The report calls for caps on donations and
greater transparency about party income. However, many of the
recommendations are tentative, reflecting disagreements between the main
parties about the nature of the problem and the preferred solutions. The
report is available to download from the inquiry’s webpage:
http://www.partyfundingreview.gov.uk/index.htm
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Links
Democracy
Watch
Australians
for Political Funding Reform
A coalition of senior academics and prominent judicial and political
identities from across the political spectrum have swung behind a new
organisation launched today that is focused on "cleaning-up" Australia's
political donations systems.
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Political Engagement
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Scott Keeter
Director, PEW Research Center Washington
SCOTT KEETER
is director of survey research for the Pew
Research
Center
in Washington,
DC.
He is co-author of four books, including
A New
Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing
American Citizen (published this year by
Oxford University Press),
The
Diminishing Divide: Religion's Changing Role in American Politics,
(Brookings Institution Press),
What
Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters
(Yale University Press), and
Uninformed
Choice: The Failure of the New Presidential Nominating System
(Praeger). His other published research includes articles and book
chapters on survey methodology, political communications and behavior,
and health care topics.
Since 1980 Keeter has been an election night analyst
of exit polls for NBC News. He previously served as chair of the
Standards Committee of the American Association for Public Opinion
Research, and will be Councillor-at-Large for the Association during
2007-2008.
From 1998 to 2002 he was chair of the Department of
Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, and
previously taught at Rutgers University and Virginia Commonwealth
University, where he also directed the Survey Research Laboratory from
1988-1991.
Interview
with Scott Keeter
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Articles by Scott
Keeter
Four years after the launch of the U.S. led invasion on March 19,
2003, public opinion about the war in Iraq has
turned decidedly negative. Most Americans regret the decision to use
military force. Majorities believe the war is not going well, and most
say that the United States should bring its troops home as soon as
possible.
Analysis by Scott
Keeter
Is Civic Behaviour Political? Exploring the
Multi-dimensional Nature of Political Participation2007 Generation Next Report:
How Young
People View Their Lives, Futures and Politics -
A PORTRAIT OF “GENERATION NEXT”
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Dr Carmen Lawrence
has announced her intention
to leave politics by stepping down as the Member for Fremantle at
the next election. She has held the seat since winning a
by-election in 1994.
Carmen Lawrence began her career in representative politics in 1986
when she won the WA state seat of Subiaco. She became the WA
Minister for Education in 1988 and subsequently added the Aboriginal
Affairs portfolio to her ministerial responsibilities.
In 1990, Carmen Lawrence became the first woman to hold the office of
Premier of a State Government. She was also the first woman Treasurer.
After entering federal politics in 1994, Carmen Lawrence served as
the Minister for Human Services and the Minister Assisting the Prime
Minister for the Status of Women in the Keating government, and
thereafter held several Shadow Ministerial portfolios, including Shadow
Minister for the Arts, Shadow Minister for Industry, Innovation, and
Technology, and Shadow Minister for Reconciliation, Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Affairs.
In 2003, Carmen Lawrence became the first directly-elected national
president of the Australian Labor Party and the first woman to hold the
position.
Carmen Lawrence's Farewell
Speech
In the wake of the Brian
Burke scandal in WA, Dr Carmen Lawrence, federal MP for Fremantle and
former Premier of WA, argues for more stringent rules governing
lobbyists’ activities and politicians’ dealings with them. Drawing on
international examples, she argues that, at the very least, the
transparency of the lobbying process needs to be far greater, yet the WA
proposals fall well short of what is required.
http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au/papers/20070329_lawrence_railrddem.pdf
Political equality in
Australia
Marian Sawer / Democratic Audit of Australia
The pursuit of political equality is one of the four underpinning values
of the Democratic Audit of Australia. In this paper, Audit leader Marian
Sawer reviews the state of Australian democracy in relation to this core
principle. Restrictions on voting, a lack of transparency surrounding
political finance, and the use of public money for party political ends
are some of the areas in which Australia currently fails to measure up.
The neo-liberal
assault on Australian universities and the future of democracy
Arran Gare / Citizen Online
The transformation of Australian universities from public institutions
to transnational business enterprises has met little effective
resistance. Yet, it is argued, this transformation undermines the
founding principles of Australian democracy. This democracy emerged in
opposition to the classical form of liberalism that the neo-liberals
have revived. The logical unfolding of social liberalism in Australia
underpinned the development of both the system of wage fixing and the
idea of public education as conditions for democracy. It is argued that
the lack of resistance to the destruction of democracy, as it was
originally understood in Australia, by successive neo-liberal
governments has been due largely to the decadent state of Australian
universities.
Read the full text of
The neo-liberal assault on Australian universities
and the future of democracy
(PDF
file)
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