			Home About us Contact

Australian Labor Party (australian + labor_party)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	80%

Selected Abstracts

Spatially Disaggregated Modelling of Voting Outcomes and Socio-Economic Characteristics at the 2001 Australian Federal Election

GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2006
ROBERT STIMSON
Abstract This study uses GIS and spatial modelling to relate voting outcomes at the 2001 federal election for polling booths across Australia with the socio-economic characteristics of polling booth catchment areas. The data and analysis used are more detailed and comprehensive than previous studies. It is conducted at a fine level of spatial disaggregation across the whole nation to examine voting outcomes for both major and minor political parties. Because the aim of the paper is to distinguish voting outcomes between political parties rather than to predict voting outcomes for particular political parties, a discriminant analysis is used rather than regression analysis. The statistical discriminant analysis identifies two main socio-economic dimensions that are able to predict polling booth outcomes with a relatively high degree of accuracy. That analysis shows how, at the 2001 federal election, the middle ground, in terms of socio-economic characteristics, was being claimed by the Liberal Party, Country Liberal Party, The Greens, and, to a lesser extent, by the Australian Labor Party. However, the Australian Democrats, National Party and One Nation had more distinctive constituencies, with the National Party and One Nation Party competing for areas with similar socio-economic characteristics. Using GIS mapping tools, examples of actual and predicted polling booth voting outcomes are given, along with selected socio-economic characteristics of booth catchments. [source]

Containing "Contamination": Cardinal Moran and Fin de Siècle Australian National Identity, 1888,1911

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 1 2010
MARK HEARN
Cardinal Patrick Moran, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney 1884,1911, believed that Australian Catholicism would flourish with the emergence of the new nation through Federation in 1901, provided that Australians turned away from foreign influences, including anarchism and nihilism. Moran also sought to use Australia to "Christianise" the enormous population of China, and believed that Chinese immigration could make a useful contribution to nation building. As the nineteenth century closed, Moran's aims were also complicated by the more insidious threats represented by a challenge to religious faith by fin de siècle ideas , a modernism manifesting as both a general challenge and a specific doctrinal relativism that might erode the Church's authority, and the threat Moran felt was posed to the development of the liberal Australian state and the Catholic Church by radical political alternatives. Concern that a mood of religious apostasy and secularisation might spread to the Catholic community also influenced Moran's support for the fledgling Australian Labor Party, which Moran believed could develop as an instrument to reinforce a moral and inclusive sense of Australian identity for the Catholic working class. Like his pro-Chinese views, Moran's advocacy of "the rights and duties of labour" was defined by an imagined alliance of evangelism and nation building, stimulated by the fear, as he expressed in 1891, of "an unchristianized world." [source]

Decades of Disillusion: Reappraising the ALP-ACTU Accord 1983,1996

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 4 2007
Geoff Dow
In this article we review the Accord between the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), in order to address current uncertainty over the role of unions in politics, particularly in the face of both the Coalition Government's 2006 industrial relations legislation and the ALP's apparent repudiation of the country's longstanding institutional leverage over wages and non-wage policies. The Accord exemplified an explicitly corporatist union strategy and it initially attracted extensive and hostile commentary. However, discussion of the experiment, together with other tripartite approaches to policy formation, has waned in recent years, perhaps suggesting that it was a tactic whose time has passed. Reviewing some major criticisms, we argue that critics have dismissed the Accord too hastily. Although serious problems with the Accord process are acknowledged, the articulation of a broad program of social democratic initiatives is always likely to retain support on the political left. Despite changes in union density and workforce composition, the union movement still possesses capacity to mobilise community support and develop a principled program. [source]

Trade Liberalisation and the Australian Labor Party

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 4 2002
Andrew Leigh
The three most substantial decisions to reduce Australia's trade barriers , in 1973, 1988 and 1991 , were made by Labor Governments. Labor's policy shift preceded the conversion of social democratic parties in other countries to trade liberalisation. To understand why this was so, it is necessary to consider trade policy as being shaped by more than interest groups and political institutions. Drawing on interviews with the main political figures, including Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Button, this article explores why the intellectual arguments for free trade had such a powerful impact on Labor's leadership, and how those leaders managed to implement major tariff cuts, while largely maintaining party unity. [source]

RESEARCH AND EVALUATION: WorkChoices and Howard's Defeat

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 3 2010
Dennis Woodward
This article seeks to perform two tasks. It seeks to first detail the changes to the industrial relations system entailed in WorkChoices (set against the background of previous Howard government policies in this field), analyse the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU's) campaign against it and the Australian Labor Party's (ALP's) industrial relations policy in response to it, and belated changes to WorkChoices. Second, it seeks to examine the extent to which WorkChoices (and the industrial relations issue) was decisive in Howard's defeat. This will be done by using Newspoll surveys to plot the revival of ALP electoral support against salient events leading up to the election, drawing upon early post election assessments and existing studies, and also examining the results of the Australian Election Study 2007 to see whether this new evidence confirms the importance of industrial relations in the election outcome. [source]