PUBLIC WEALTH,PUBLIC HEALTH,AND PRIVATE STEALTH: EXAMINING THE BLACK MARKET IN CIGARETTES IN AUSTRALIA

Taxes on tobacco provide a significant income for the Australian government — $5.1 billion in 2001. At the same time, health officials are making strenuous efforts to reduce smoking, particularly among teenagers. Some economists suggest that raising taxes on tobacco will produce more revenue while at the same time lowering smoking rates, particularly among youths who have less discretionary spending power than adults. But a by‐product of excise tax in Australia has been the emerging market in “chop‐chop,” tobacco diverted from legal channels by growers who receive considerably higher prices for a part of their yield than they can obtain from legal manufacturers. The article details this situation and suggests that only bold solutions may be able to reduce tensions in tax policies, smoking rates and the “chop‐chop” black market.     

DECRIMINALISATION OF PUBLIC DRUNKENNESS IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA: THE PROCESS EXPLAINED

Two alternative models of service provision are associated with decriminalisation of public drunkenness – the medical or sickness model and the social welfare model. In the development of alternative strategies to accompany decriminalisation, Australian jurisdictions have largely followed the latter welfare approach. In Western Australia, decriminalisation of public drunkenness was spurred by the recommendations of the Muirhead Interim Report on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. A community development approach was used to establish local management structures for sobering-up programs in areas of greatest need. Three sobering-up centres are now operating in the State with a fourth centre due to open in mid 1993. Some preliminary evaluation of the Western Australian program has been carried out but a more comprehensive research and evaluation program is being conducted to assess the impact of decriminalisation and the development of alternative responses.     

PHARMACEUTICAL BENEFITS IN AUSTRALIA AND SWEDEN: WELFARE POLICY AND THE COST OF PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

Pharmaceutical benefits provide a stable framework within which consumers, prescribers, suppliers, pharmacists and other actors undertake transactions. The state in effect delivers a good that enhances individual autonomy. A major reason for the legitimacy enjoyed by pharmaceutical benefits in both Australia and Sweden is that these programs have strong attributes of universalism (rather than targeting). Sweden's predominantly public health system allows greater scope for pharmaceutical policy innovation. Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), while historically resilient and effective, is now wedged precariously between traditional considerations of equity and public health on the one hand, and constant pressure for increased marketisation on the other.     

JOB SECURITY IN AUSTRALIA: BROADENING THE ANALYSIS

An examination of the discussion surrounding aspects of job security in Australia in light of the apparently conflicting evidence and interpretations of the prevailing trends. Notions of job security need to move beyond the narrow perception of a link to actual or expected job duration. After a discussion of why job security is of policy interest, the various definitions and interpretations of the concept are reviewed. This leads to a consideration of whether the available evidence indicates job security is increasing or decreasing in Australia.     

ETHNICITY NOT RACE: A PUBLIC HEALTH PERSPECTIVE

This article presents an argument, from a public health perspective, against the use of the term ‘race’ and for its replacement by the term ‘ethnicity’. Historically, the rise of the race concept in society was dependent on its undeserved status as an objective scientific and biological category and was associated with strategies of exclusion and political domination. Mainstream science played a key role in the rise of the race concept but has since largely abandoned it in face of evidence from population genetics. Similarly, the public health movement has historically been concerned with race/ethnicity as a determinant of unequal health status, but the race term has now all but disappeared from the Australian public health literature, where it has been replaced by the concept of ethnicity. Ethnicity is a complex social variable, with cultural and political dimensions, but no biological dimension. Adopting a public health perspective on ethnicity which recognises the fluid and contested nature of this socio‐political variable, whilst seeking to make explicit its relevance and definitional limits, allows us to dispense with the race concept altogether, since race has no additional explanatory or strategic value above that of ethnicity. The race term is still commonly used, however, in general conversation and in the media. The persistence of the race concept and of racism is difficult to explain but may be related historically to the politics of nationalism, and in modern times to the politics of difference and identity that characterise the modern multicultural nation‐state. Abandoning the terminology of race leaves racism without any logical basis, and may contribute to a process of social change, although it cannot be expected to eliminate the phenomenon of racism.     

AN ANALYSIS OF THE DEBATE ON INTERGENERATIONAL EQUITY AND FISCAL SUSTAINABILITY IN AUSTRALIA

The authorities in a number of advanced countries have produced intergenerational reports that seek to determine the fiscal sustainability of current policy parameters. The Australian government will publish its Intergenerational Report in May 2002. This paper attempts to place these reports in analytical perspective. We examine the notion of intergenerational equity, the conceptual basis for generational accounting, Australian efforts at constructing generational accounts, and then review the intergenerational reports of several other countries. The paper concludes with a brief synoptic discussion of various policies that can help Australian governments achieve intergenerational balance in future.     

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE AND THE ELDERLY POPULATION

This paper reviews demographic trends and their implications for the growing population of elderly people, as well as their impact upon the total population of the nation. The nature and characteristics of frailty should be an area of major concern, as should the implications of frailty as related to service delivery. Although attention is being paid to the concept of frailty, no commonly accepted operational definition of frailty has as yet been developed.     

THE CONTEXT FOR COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN HEALTH ACTION IN AUSTRALIA

Community participation is one of the underlying principles of democratic societies and the potential benefits of the participation process are well documented. Although a number of participatory mechanisms have been established by government departments and community agencies to facilitate community participation in health, few Australians regularly or actively participate. This paper examines the context for participation in health action in Australia including a political culture which serves to discourage participation in health, and many other areas, and barriers to participation associated with the complex structure and financing of the health care system.     

POSTCOLONIAL TRAUMA: THE CONTEMPORARY REMOVAL OF INDIGENOUS CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE FROM THEIR FAMILIES IN AUSTRALIA

The removal of Indigenous children from their families within contemporary Australia is considered by way of both child protection and juvenile justice interventions and within the context of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. In particular, the article considers the findings and recommendations of the Inquiry in relation to contemporary removals and Government responses to those recommendations.     

TAXES AND SOCIAL SPENDING: THE SHIFTING DEMANDS OF THE AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC

This paper uses data from the Australian Election Studies (1987–2001) to investigate the preference for lower taxes or higher social spending among Australian voters. We offer some explanations for the increased support for higher social spending, especially after the election of the Howard Government in 1996. Regression models allow us to distinguish various factors that predict support for higher social spending. The main conclusions of the paper are that support for social spending is higher among voters with ‘social‐democratic’ attitudes and voting preferences but significantly, is also higher among voters who think health and Medicare services have declined since 1998. These findings are discussed in the context of various possible explanations for declining support for tax cuts.     

SUPPLYING AND PROMOTING ‘GROG’: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ALCOHOL IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

The deleterious effects of alcohol misuse among Aboriginal Australians have been well documented and are widely acknowledged by Aboriginal people. However, most academic discussion has attempted to explain the demand for alcohol by Aboriginal people. In this review, we argue for an analysis of the political economy of Aboriginal alcohol use which also focuses on the supply and promotion of alcohol. Our own research and that of others demonstrates the utility of such an approach and the practical benefits it offers for harm minimisation strategies.     

CONTESTING FAIRNESS AND FRAGMENTING GROUPS: CULTURAL NARRATIVES OF TAXATION AND CITIZENSHIP IN GLOBALISING AUSTRALIA

This paper explores the relationship between culturally mediated narratives of fairness, conceptions of the state, group and individual identities, citizenship and debates about globalisation in Australian perspectives on tax administration. It is based on a qualitative analysis of 2374 responses to a survey of attitudes to the Australian tax system. This paper emphasises that taxpayer's statements can be read as cultural acts that enrich our understanding of how people give meaning and significance to their lives. The majority of respondents reported that taxation should be levied fairly across social groups. However, this sense of fairness is being eroded by the widespread perception that the wealthy are avoiding their “fair share” of taxes. However, although citizens view tax administration as increasingly unfair, there is no evidence of wholesale disengagement from the system. The majority of people believe that the tax system has legitimacy and that it can be reformed. There is still scope for policy innovation that reinstates a sense of fairness, equity and balance to the tax system.     

TWO WAVES OF CROATIAN MIGRANTS IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA: CLASS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

This paper examines the ways in which two waves of Croatian migrants in Western Australia have constructed their ethnic/national identity following migration. These two waves – the first took place during the 1960s and the early 1970s and the second in the late 1980s/early 1990s – are considerably different in terms of their socio-economic background. The earlier wave came from rural areas of Croatia and can be described as typically working class, while the recent wave came from the cities and predominantly consists of professional people. Migrants from the 1960s wave express a strong identification with their place (village, town, island) of origin and form a rather close-knit ethnic ‘community of place’. There is a strong link between territory, ethnicity and identity in this group of migrants. Recent developments in Croatia (the war for independence) have helped to ‘enlarge’ this local-ethnic focus into an ‘imagined’ national identity. Ethno-national belonging and identification is not emphasised in the recent group of Croatian migrants. Their ‘Croatianness’ is secondary in the re-construction of their identity following migration. It is their professional identification that seems to be central in this process. They consider the Croatian ‘ethnic community’ to be irrelevant to their life in Australia and seek to integrate into the broader Australian community primarily through their professional work.     

PARADIGMATIC MADNESS IN THE PUBLIC REPRESENTATION OF CHILDHOOD

Western images of the child draw on a secure thematic tradition which may be interpreted in terms of an equation that locates childhood on one side and diverse forms of madness on the other. Explicitly within Freud's psychoanalytic theory of id functioning, Piaget's epigenetic studies of children's cognition, and by long standing legal convention, children are understood variously as sub-rational, pre-rational, or in some critically relevant sense intellectually deficient. Implicitly a corresponding argument may be discerned both in written text and in pictorial representations of the child in religious, mythological, artistic, and literary sources as well as in the discourses of everyday language. This paper takes up those principal themes within the conceptual substrate of childhood which invest it with madness in one form or other. In particular it explores the extent to which madness, though highly unfashionable as an attribute, appears in commonplace settings as a positive characteristic of children and the idea of childhood.     

THE IMPACTS OF DEREGULATION AND AGRICULTURAL RESTRUCTURING FOR RURAL AUSTRALIA

As a leader in the Cairns Group of Nations, Australia has been advancing deregulation in agri‐food trade. Successive governments have assumed that Australia would benefit from a greater deregulation of international trade because this would allow increased access to world markets for primary agricultural commodities. But regulation exists, at least in Europe, to protect the social value of the rural landscape. Australian governments, strongly influenced by economic rationalist ideology, have given insufficient consideration to the rural social landscape. Little critical reflection has taken place about whether Australia, and its farmers, would actually benefit from deregulation, or what the social impacts of this trend might be. Deregulation inevitably invokes structural adjustment, forces farmers out of agriculture, depopulates rural areas, and creates social hardship. There are also environmental ramifications. The exit of farmers from agriculture has not been as fast as was expected by economists and policy‐makers, with many farmers adapting to new situations.     

SEXUAL INTIMATE HOMICIDES INVOLVING OVERSEAS-BORN IN AUSTRALIA: THE TIP OF THE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ICEBERG?

This article examines the results relating to offenders' birthplace in a study on homicide between adult sexual intimates. The research showed a disproportionately high number of overseas-horn perpetrators and that cases were usually preceded by a history of physical or emotional violence often characterised by jealousy. The author concludes that these data may he an anomaly, or a sign of high domestic violence rates in these communities, or an indication that domestic violence is less reported by the overseas-born women survivors. The latter two theories are discussed using overseas and Australian literature on domestic violence.     

THE RUSH TO REGULATE: THE SHIFT IN AUSTRALIA FROM THE RULE OF MARKETS TO THE RULE OF CAPITAL

There has been a significant shift in the momentum of national economic policy in Australia, from the market as an end in itself, towards a regulated policy agenda that asserts the social, cultural and economic rule of capital. This ‘new’ policy is what neo‐liberalism really involves. Arguments about ‘free markets’ and ‘economic rationalism’ fail to recognise the shift and are thus not germane to current policy analysis.