The planning of airport regions and National Aviation Policy Issues and challenges in the Australian experience 2008-2009

The planning of airports has long been contentious because of their localisation of negative impacts. The globalisation, commercialisation and deregulation of the aviation industry has unleashed powerful new economic forces both on and offairport. Over the last two decades, many airports have evolved into airport cities located at the heart of the wider aerotropolis region. This shifts the appropriate scale of planning analysis towards broader regional concerns. However,governments have been slow to respond and airport planning usually remains poorly integrated with local, city and regional planning imperatives. The Australian experience exemplifies the divide. The privatization of major Australian airports from 1996 has seen billions of dollars spent on new airside and landside infrastructure but with little oversight from local and state authorities because the ultimate authority for on-airport development is the Federal Minister for Transport. Consequently, there have been growing tensions in many major airport regions between the private airport lessee and the broader community, exacerbated by both the building of highly conspicuous non-aeronautical developments and growing airport area congestion. This paper examines the urban planning content of Australia’s national aviation policy review (2008-09) with reference to current and potential opportunities for all-of-region collaboration in the planning process.

Queensland Aborigines, multiple realities and the social sources of suffering: Psychiatry and moral regions of being (Part 1)

This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico-religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal „other‟ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio- political realities. I conclude that the residents‟ narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream „commonsense‟ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.

The Australian election survey: the tale of the rabbit-less hat. Voting behaviour in 2007

This paper examines voter attitudes and behaviour at the 2007 Australian federal election., using data from the Australian Election Study. It considers socio-demographic factors as well as the role of policy issues and voter evaluations of the party leaders. The paper concludes that issues, such as the government's WorkChoices policy, as well as health and leadership contributed to Labor's victory.

Anger and depression predict hospital use among chronic heart failure patients

Costly hospital readmissions among chronic heart failure (CHF) patients are expected to increase dramatically with the ageing population. This study investigated the prognostic ability of depression, anger and anxiety, prospectively, and after adjusting for illness severity, on the number of readmissions to hospital and the total length of stay over one year. Participants comprised 175 inpatients with CHF. Depression, anger, anxiety, and illness severity were measured at baseline. One year later, the number of readmissions and length of stay for each patient were obtained from medical records. Depression and anger play a detrimental role in the health profile of CHF patients.

From Sydney and Shanghai : Australian and Chinese women writing modernism

In the 1930s and 1940s, Australian women writers published novels, poems, and short stories that pushed the boundaries of their national literary culture. From their position in the Pacific, they entered into a dialogue with a European modernism that they reworked to invigorate their own writing and to make cross-continental connections. My interest in the work of Australian women prose writers of this period stems from an appreciation of the extent of their engagement with interwar modernism (an engagement that is generally under-acknowledged) and the realization that there are commonalities of approach with the ways in which contemporaneous Chinese authors negotiated this transnational cultural traffic. China and Australia, it has been argued, share an imaginative and literal association of many centuries, and this psychic history produces a situation in which ‘Australians feel drawn towards China: they cannot leave it alone.’1 Equally, Chinese exploration of the great southern land began in the fifteenth century, prior to European contact. In recent times, the intensity of Australia’s cultural and commercial connections with Asia has led to a repositioning of the Australian sense of regionalism in general and, in particular, has activated yet another stage in the history of its relationship with China. In this context, the association of Australian and Chinese writing is instructive because the commonalities of approach and areas of interest between certain authors indicate that Australian writers were not alone in either the content or style of their response to European modernism. This recognition, in turn, advances discussions of modernism in Australia and reveals an alternative way of looking at the world from the Pacific Rim through literature. The intent is to examine selective Australian and Chinese authors who are part of this continuous history and whose writing demonstrates common thematic and stylistic features via the vector of modernism. I focus on the 1930s and 1940s because these are the decades in which Australia and China experienced wideranging conflict in the Pacific, and it is significant that war, both forthcoming and actual, features as an ominous soundtrack in the writing of Chinese and Australian women. I argue that, given the immensity of cultural difference between Australia and China, there is an especially interesting juncture in the ways in which the authors interrogate modernist practices and the challenge of modernism. The process in which writing from the Pacific Rim jointly negotiates the twin desires of engaging with European literary form and representing one’s own culture may be seen as what Jessica Berman identifies as a geomodernism, one of the ‘new possible geographies’ of modernism.2 My discussion centres on the work of the Australian women, to which the Chinese material serves as a point of reference, albeit a critical one. The Chinese writing examined here is restricted to authors who wrote at least some material in English and whose work is available in translation.

Building resilience to prevent mental health problems in young people : The resourceful adolescent programme (RAP)

This chapter describes an evidence-based programme called the Resourceful Adolescent Program (RAP), which has been successful in building resilience in young people to prevent depressive symptoms developing.The programme adopts a strengths-focused approach. It aims to build a range of coping resources that foster teenagers’ abilities to maintain a positive sense of self and regulate emotions in the face of the vicissitudes of everyday struggles and difficult life events.This groupbased programme can be implemented routinely in schools or by counselling professionals as an early intervention or prevention programme. While there is no universal definition, ‘resilience’ generally means the process of avoiding the negative trajectories associated with exposure to risk factors (Fergus and Zimmerman, 2005). Current models of resilience are also very clear that there ‘are many pathways to resilience’ (Bonanno, 2004) and there is no

Navigating iScapes : Australian youth constructing identities and social relations in a network society

This paper extends Appadurai’s notion of “scapes” to delineate what we see as “iScapes”. We contend that iScapes captures the way online technologies shape interactions that invariably filter into offline contexts, giving shape and meaning to human actions and motivations. By drawing on research on high school students’ online activities we examine the flow of iScapes they inhabit in the process of constructing identities and forming social relations.

The diversity management approach to equal employment opportunity in Australian organisations

This article assesses the 'Managing Diversity' (MD) approach in Australia, examining its drivers, discussing its relationship to legislation designed to promote equity, and examining it as a set of management practices. It has been plausibly argued, on efficiency grounds, that responsibility for achieving equality objectives must be shifted to organisations as this links contextual conditions to organisational processes. However, even where there is some prescription and guidance such as that provided by Australian Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) legislation targeted specifically to women employees, both practice and outcomes are variable. This is even more the case with MD where there are no guiding principles or legislative support. The article examines the best practice EEO and MD programs of Australian organisations to demonstrate the approaches and programs that are being developed at the workplace and to highlight the limitations of the 'business case' approach underlying such programs.

The knowledge exchange intermediary as service provider : a discussion and an Australian case

The critical impact of innovation on national and the global economies has been discussed at length in the literature. Economic development requires the diffusion of innovations into markets. It has long been recognised that economic growth and development depends upon a constant stream of innovations. Governments have been keenly aware of the need to ensure this flow does not dry to a trickle and have introduced many and varied industry policies and interventions to assist in seeding, supporting and diffusing innovations. In Australia, as in many countries, Government support for the transfer of knowledge especially from publicly funded research has resulted in the creation of knowledge exchange intermediaries. These intermediaries are themselves service organisations, seeking innovative service offerings for their markets. The choice for most intermediaries is generally a dichotomous one, between market-pull and technology-push knowledge exchange programmes. In this article, we undertake a case analysis of one such innovative intermediary and its flagship programme. We then compare this case with other successful intermediaries in Europe. We put forward a research proposition that the design of intermediary programmes must match the service type they offer. That is, market-pull programmes require market-pull design, in close collaboration with industry, whereas technology programmes can be problem-solving innovations where demand is latent. The discussion reflects the need for an evolution in knowledge transfer policies and programmes beyond the first generation ushered in with the US Bayh-Dole Act (1980) and Stevenson-Wydler Act (1984). The data analysed is a case study comparison of market-pull and technology-push programmes, focusing on primary and secondary socio-economic benefits (using both Australian and international comparisons).

Towards a model of understanding strategic decision-making in micro-firms : exploring the Australian information technology sector

This study explores strategic decision-making (SDM) in micro-firms, an economically significant business subsector. As extant large- and small-firm literature currently proffers an incomplete characterization of SDM in very small enterprises, a multiple-case methodology was used to investigate how these firms make strategic decisions. Eleven Australian Information Technology service micro-firms participated in the study. Using an information-processing lens, the study uncovered patterns of SDM in micro-firms and derived a theoretical micro-firm SDM model. This research also identifies several implications for micro-firm management and directions for future research, contributing to the understanding of micro-firm SDM in both theory and practice.

Posttraumatic growth in Australian populations

It is easy to assume that because Australia and the United States are both predominantly English speaking countries that are relatively young and share many similarities in terms of their historical beginnings, they elicit the same results when investigating psychological constructs. In recent years this has been questioned across a number of domains (e.g., personality and stereotyping) and research has demonstrated that although many constructs are universal, there are differences between these nations; some subtle and others quite stark (McCrae et al., 2005; Terraciano et al., 2005). In this chapter we discuss research that has investigated Posttraumatic Growth (PTG) in various populations in Australia and highlight the similarities and differences that have been found between Australian samples and those published in other countries, especially the US. Data are drawn from quantitative and qualitative investigations conducted with groups who have experienced diverse traumatic events as either direct survivors (e.g., rape, armed hold-up, bereavement) or vicarious survivors (e.g., paramedics). A description of the Australian context sets the scene for the ensuing discussion about PTG in Australian populations.

Australian cinema’s dark sun : the boom in Australian horror film production

There has been a boom in Australian horror movie production in recent years. Daybreakers (2010), Wolf Creek (2005), Rogue (2007), Undead (2003), Black Water (2008), and Storm Warning (2006) among others, have all experienced varying degrees of popularity, mainstream visibility, and cult success in worldwide horror markets. While Aussie horror’s renaissance is widely acknowledged in industry literature, there is limited research into the extent of the boom and the dynamics of production. Consequently, there are few explanations for why and how this surge has occurred. This paper argues that the recent growth in Australian horror films has been driven by intersecting international market forces, domestic financing factors, and technological change. In so doing, it identifies two distinct tiers of Australian horror film production: ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’ production; though overlap between these two tiers results in ‘high-end indie’ films capable of cinema release. Each tier represents the high and low-ends of Australian horror film production, each with different financing, production, and distribution models.

Australasian horror special issue editorial : putting Australian and New Zealand horror movies on the map of cinema studies

This Australasian horror special issue is an important step forward in putting Australian and New Zealand horror movies on the map of film and cinema studies as a subject worthy of intellectual debate. The journal issue is the first devoted solely to the academic discussion of Australasian horror movies. While an Australian horror movie tradition has produced numerous titles since the 1970s achieving commercial success and cult popularity worldwide, the horror genre is largely missing from Australian film history. While there have been occasional essays on standout titles such as Wolf Creek (Mclean, 2005), an increasing number of articles on ‘Ozploitation’ movies, and irregular discussion about Australian Gothic, overall the nature of Australian horror as a genre remains poorly understood. In terms of New Zealand, debate has tended to revolve around ‘Kiwi Gothic’ and of course Peter Jackon’s early splatter films, rather than Kiwi horror as a specific filmmaking tradition.