Australian Politics At A Crossroads

As the 21st century proceeds apace, Australia faces new and old challenges, both domestically and internationally. These include managing complex governance issues, preventing democratic fracture, balancing an ever- shifting geopolitical strategic order, addressing the recognition and identity demands of marginalised groups, and responding to crises and urgent policy challenges, such as climate change. Bonotti, Miragliotta, and the other contributors to this volume analyse and evaluate the challenges which confront Australia by locating them in their national and comparative context. The various contributions reveal that while these challenges are neither novel nor unique to Australia, the way in which they manifest and Australia’s responses to them are shaped by the country’s distinctive history, culture, geography, location, and size. The chapters offer a cutting- edge analysis of these pressing challenges faced by Australia and offer reflections on how to address them. The book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of Australian politics, and of comparative politics in a global perspective.

Using the notion of ‘crossroads’ to provide a unique lens through which to examine the realities of rural crime, Crossroads of Rural Crime provides an understanding of the nature of rural life and ways in which transgression manifests itself in the context of a presumed rural-urban divide.

Iran stands at a critical juncture in its history. In the era of Presidents Hassan Rouhani and Barack Obama, the Islamic Republic has a unique opportunity to regain its traditional greatness as a cradle of rich civilisation and culture, with a capacity to be a very influential and stabilising regional actor. In this incisive analysis, Amin Saikal, a leading expert on Iranian politics, traces Iran's transition from pro-Western monarchy to Islamic Republic and explores the choices open to Rouhani's moderate reformist government. The Islamic Republic has endured a difficult journey throughout its existence. But since Khomeini assumed power in 1979 it has been characterised by a degree of exceptionalism, which has seen Iran lock horns with the United States and prove itself an effective and shrewdly calculating player on the international stage. Looking to the future, Saikal does not shy away from confronting the difficult choices facing Iran today. Failure to achieve reconciliation with the United States in the coming years, he argues, will not only have serious implications for Iran's internal stability and for the future security of the Middle East, but also for America's position within this volatile and unpredictable region.

With Australia on the brink of Kevin Rudds national history curriculum, this book explores the issues confronting us in 2010. Who owns the past? How do politicians use it? How does it shape who we are? An absorbing insight into the power, privelege and pleasures of the past.

In this ambitious study, Anna K. Boucher and Justin Gest present a unique analysis of immigration governance across thirty countries. Relying on a database of immigration demographics in the world's most important destinations, they present a novel taxonomy and an analysis of what drives different approaches to immigration policy over space and time. In an era defined by inequality, populism, and fears of international terrorism, they find that governments are converging toward a 'Market Model' that seeks immigrants for short-term labor with fewer outlets to citizenship - an approach that resembles the increasingly contingent nature of labor markets worldwide.

Conventional politics is at a crossroads. Amid recession, depression, poverty, increasing violence and rising inequality, our current politics is exhausted and inadequate. In Red Tory, Phillip Blond argues that only a radical new political settlement can tackle the problems we face. Red Toryism combines economic egalitarianism with social conservatism, calling for an end to the monopolisation of society and the private sphere by the state and the market. Decrying the legacy of both the Labour and Conservative parties, Blond proposes a genuinely progressive Conservatism that will restore social equality and revive British culture. He calls for the strengthening of local communities and economies, ending dispossession, redistribution of the tax burden and restoration the nuclear family. Red Tory offers a different vision for our future and asks us to question our long-held political assumptions. No political thinker has aroused more passionate debate in recent times. Phillip Blond's ideas have already been praised or attacked in every major British newspaper and journal. Challenging, stimulating and exhilarating, this is a book for our times.

Multiculturalism has been one of the dominant concerns in political theory over the last decade. To date, this inquiry has been mostly informed by, or applied to, the Canadian, American, and increasingly, the European contexts. This volume explores for the first time how the Australian experience both relates and contributes to political thought on multiculturalism. Focusing on whether a multicultural regime undermines political integration, social solidarity, and national identity, the authors draw on the Australian case to critically examine the challenges, possibilities, and limits of multiculturalism as a governing idea in liberal democracies. These essays by distinguished Australian scholars variously treat the relation between liberalism and diversity, democracy and diversity, culture and rights, and evaluate whether Australia's thirty-year experiment in liberal multiculturalism should be viewed as a successful model.

The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is a comprehensive collection that considers Australia's distinctive politics— both ancient and modern— at all levels and across many themes. It examines the factors that make Australian politics unique and interesting, while firmly placing these in the context of the nation's Indigenous and imported heritage and global engagement. The book presents an account of Australian politics that recognizes and celebrates its inherent diversity by taking a thematic approach in six parts. The first theme addresses Australia's unique inheritances, examining the development of its political culture in relation to the arrival of British colonists and their conflicts with First Nations peoples, as well as the resulting geopolitics. The second theme, improvization, focuses on Australia's political institutions and how they have evolved. Place-making is then considered to assess how geography, distance, Indigenous presence, and migration shape Australian politics. Recurrent dilemmas centres on a range of complex, political problems and their influence on contemporary political practice. Politics, policy, and public administration covers how Australia has been a world leader in some respects, and a laggard in others, when dealing with important policy challenges. The final theme, studying Australian politics, introduces some key areas in the study of Australian politics and identifies the strengths and shortcomings of the discipline. The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is an opportunity for others to consider the nation's unique politics from the perspective of leading and emerging scholars, and to gain a strong sense of its imperfections, its enduring challenges, and its strengths.