Women, minorities, and proportional representation in Parliament : a proposal for voting reform

The right to vote permits the voices of the electorate to be heard in democracies. However, voting is often insufficient for minorities to obtain representation by their preferred candidates. For traditional political ‘minorities’ including women, self-representation is essential to political equality and social equity. Despite holding roughly 50% of the electoral vote in Australia for 100 years, women comprise only 22% of the Commonwealth Members and 29% of Senators. This paper proposes a new vote counting system, STV with Borda elimination or STV-B. STV-B retains proportional representation but much greater voter control over selection of candidates. STV-B would provide women with a mechanism that yields proportional representation for women without undermining party representation.

On the margins : a study of the representation of the arts in the news pages of the newspaper

The principal objective of this paper is to investigate how the arts are represented in the Australian print media. The research is conducted by means of textual analysis focusing on a number of case studies where arts stories appeared in the news pages of an Australian daily broadsheet newspaper. This paper argues that in these case studies the arts are represented in terms of a limited range of rhetorical frameworks. These frameworks help constitute public knowledge about the arts and their marginalised status in Australia. This paper offers a critique of current arts policy which fails to recognise the role of the media in reinforcing the marginalisation of the arts.

Multiple representation in learning about evaporation

This study draws on recent research on the central role of representation in learning. While there has been considerable research on Children’s understanding of evaporation, the representational issues entailed in this understanding have not been investigated in depth. The study explored students’ engagement with science concepts relating to evaporation through various representational modes such as diagrams, verbal accounts, gestures, and captioned drawings. This engagement entails students a) clarifying their thinking through exploring representational resources, b) developing understanding of what these representations signify and c) learning how to construct and interpret the representational aspects of scientific explanation. The study indicates how a focus on representation can provide fresh insights into the conceptual task involved in learning science. Primary school classroom sequences and structured interviews with 12 children indicated a range of learning potentialities flowing from this focus. The findings suggest that teacher-mediated negotiation of representational issues as students construct different modal accounts can support enriched learning by enabling both a) richer conceptual understanding by students and b) enhanced teacher insights into students’ thinking.

'Lost worlds' : reflections on home and belonging in Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies

This article draws upon Holocaust survivor testimonies to explore the interaction between place and displacement in the formation and evolution of local, Jewish and ethnic identities. In particular, the ways in which the personal experiences of interviewees have affected their notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are addressed. Relationships with former homelands vary and have been significantly affected by pre-war, wartime and post-war experiences. Connections with home and family have frequently been severed and are more likely to exist in diasporic communities than in countries of origin.