Australia's health 1992 : the third biennial report of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

Australia's Health is the most comprehensive and authoritative source of national information on health in Australia. Australia's Health is published mid-year in even-numbered years and provides national statistics and related information that form a record of health status, service provision and expenditure in Australia.

The needs, concerns and characteristics of younger Australian adults with Type 2 diabetes

Aims : The mean age of onset of Type 2 diabetes mellitus is decreasing in Australia and internationally. We conducted an internet-based survey to improve our understanding of the emotional well-being and unmet needs of younger adults with Type 2 diabetes, and to inform service provision for this group.<br /><br />Methods : A random sample of National Diabetes Services Scheme registrants (n = 1,417) with Type 2 diabetes, aged 18&ndash;39 years, living in the Australian state of Victoria received an invitation to complete the online survey. The study was also advertised state-wide. The survey included validated scales (PAID-5: diabetes-related distress; WHO-5: general emotional well-being) and study-specific items. A total of 149 eligible respondents participated.<br /><br />Results : Almost two-thirds (63%) of respondents reported severe-diabetes related distress; more than a quarter (27%) had impaired general emotional well-being. Most (82%) were overweight or obese (BMI &ge; 25); most (77%) had at least one other co-morbidity. Lack of motivation, feeling burned out, and being time-poor were identified as top barriers to self-management. More than half (59%) of respondents had not participated in structured diabetes education. Respondents perceived that younger adults with Type 2 diabetes had different health-care needs than their older counterparts (68%), and that most Type 2 diabetes information/services were aimed at older adults (62%). Of a range of potential new services, respondents indicated greatest interest in an online forum specifically for younger adults with Type 2 diabetes.<br /><br />Conclusions : Younger adults with Type 2 diabetes have impaired emotional well-being and physical health. Population-based research is needed to confirm the current findings, to further inform service delivery and optimise outcomes for this group.<br />

Nazi Germany as a christian state : the 'Protestant experience' of 1933 in Württemberg

&nbsp;This article examines the response of Christians in Germany to the first year of the Nazi state. It responds to Manfred Gailus' call of 'micro-histories' and onsiders how Protestants in W&uuml;rttemberg conceived of 1933 and how they responded to the Nazis' antisemitism. It argues that they drew on a pre-existing myth of national-religious revival in World War I (the 'spirit of 1914') and remained 'actively passive' when it came to antisemitism.

Confucius institutes and China's national identity

This article examines China&rsquo;s Confucius Institute program, a significant language policy and planning initiative. I adopt a political perspective in looking into the birth of this language policy initiative, focusing on its role in reconstructing China&rsquo;s national identity in the context of its rise and its international relations. I explore the background against which the Confucius Institute initiative was formed, and analyse how the Confucius Institute initiative was received in the West and how China responded to it. I argue that China is undergoing a reconstruction of its national identity and the Confucius Institute initiative is a major part of this effort. I suggest that such a reconstruction of national identity is an interactive process with an outcome resulting from China&rsquo;s negotiation with the international community, involving China stating a new position, listening to international responses, clarifying and elaborating upon its position until its new position is accepted by the international community.

American defence policy and the challenge of austerity : some implications for Southeast Asia

This article examines the Obama administration&rsquo;s attempt to rebalance U.S. strategy towards the Asia-Pacific region with special emphasis on Southeast Asia. It argues that America&rsquo;s regional pivot is occurring at a time of unprecedented domestic fiscal austerity caused by a staggering level of national debt. <br /><br />The U.S. domestic budget crisis, the current &ldquo;declinist&rdquo; debate, concern over the rise of China, and the impact of sequestration on American defence spending are analysed and their implications for Southeast Asia are assessed. The article suggests that the most serious aspect of the U.S. debt crisis may be its impact upon American strategic resilience and geopolitical confidence. <br /><br />Thus, while many ASEAN nations have welcomed the U.S. strategic pivot as a valuable reinforcement of their security, they remain unsure that it is a sustainable policy. In the future, it is likely that reassuring ASEAN of the longevity of the U.S. commitment to the Asia-Pacific will require of Washington a skilled blend of budgetary reform, military presence, and sustained diplomatic effort.

White tribe: echoes of the Anzac myth in Cronulla

Since the publication of Fiske, Hodge and Turner&rsquo;s Myths of Oz: Reading Australian&nbsp;Popular Culture (1987), Australian Cultural Studies has turned to the beach as a primary&nbsp;site for examining national identity and the myths of Australian culture. In the text the&nbsp;beach is read as a liminal site between &lsquo;culture&rsquo; and &lsquo;nature&rsquo;, represented respectively by&nbsp;lifesaver and surfer. The meanings of anti-authoritarianism attached to the surfer are&nbsp;significant to the reading. And yet Fiske, Hodge and Turner also locate a heritage of&nbsp;authoritarianism, discipline and civic duty in the figure of the lifesaver:&nbsp;<br /><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />'Lifesavers have drills, march-pasts and patrol squads, while exercising a conservative pastoral&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">interest in their members&rsquo; moral health. They are agents of social control. Further, they see&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">themselves as servants of the community, sacrificing their weekends for others&mdash;a tradition of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">sacrifice dear to a nation which twice voted no to conscription in the Great War.' (Fiske et al.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">1987, 64&ndash;65)&nbsp;</span><div><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />The last sentence distils the bifocal meanings not only of the &lsquo;culture&rsquo; of the beach but of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">Australian cultural identity more broadly, framed by contested norms of civic participation&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">and moral values.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">This binary frame has been a productive starting point for analyses of national identity&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">in Australian Cultural Studies since the 1980s. These have dropped off the radar in recent&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">years owing to a shift away from the national field and the privileging of a transnational&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">cultural agenda. And yet recent events in Australian politics and culture have&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">unexpectedly re-centred national identity as an urgent issue for Cultural Studies,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">particularly in its use as a form of exclusion to targeted populations within the national&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 12px;">community.<br /></span><br />In light of these developments this article revisits Myths of Oz and its construction of&nbsp;surfer and lifesaver c.1987 to focus on the reordering and re-assemblage of these figures on&nbsp;Sydney&rsquo;s beaches 20 years on. It also acknowledges that this is a process which cannot be&nbsp;understood in isolation from broader shifts in Australian political culture, and particularly&nbsp;the current obsession with national &lsquo;values&rsquo; hinging on a strategic shift away from&nbsp;multicultural policies and the redefinition of the &lsquo;fringe&rsquo; as an ethnic position.<br /><br />Reflecting on these issues, this article locates a slippage between the binary framing of&nbsp;the surfer and lifesaver in Myths of Oz and their complex &lsquo;relationality&rsquo; on the beach today.&nbsp;Specifically, it examines how the surfer has recently become co-opted into the Australian&nbsp;mainstream and imbued with a form of &lsquo;governmental belonging&rsquo; (Hage 1998) once&nbsp;attributed to the lifesaver alone. This slippage has been enabled by the overlap betweenlocal surfie cultures and exclusivist national cultures assembled by State and federal&nbsp;governments; particularly as both draw upon a normative frame that opposes the&nbsp;meanings of white belonging to Muslim groupings within the nation.</div>

National identity in fragile states: insights from tertiary students in Melanesia and Timor-Leste

The challenges of nation building in Melanesia and Timor-Leste have often been neglected in the regional focus on state-building challenges. High levels of ethno-linguistic diversity, combined with an array of regional, historical and cultural divisions, continue to present obstacles to the creation of a cohesive sense of national political community leading these nations to be labelled &lsquo;fragile&rsquo;. This paper presents the findings of a comparative study on the attitudes of tertiary students in Melanesia and Timor-Leste to national identity and nation building. A strong pan-Melanesian pattern of group identification was identified, common to Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The ongoing importance of traditional authority and custom in informing conceptions of political community and identity was evident in all four case study sites, but was in each case matched by indicators of respect for modern state authority. The survey also reveals some significant gender differences in key attitudes towards national identity, including the role of traditional authorities. Most importantly, the study reveals high degrees of national pride, and faith in democratic principles and citizenship; but conversely, low levels of pride in contemporary democratic performance and inter-group tolerance.

Reconciling custom, citizenship and colonial legacies: Ni-Vanuatu tertiary student attitudes to national identity

Nation-building remains a key challenge in Vanuatu. From the origins of this new nation in 1980, it was clear that creating a unifying sense of national identity and political community from multiple languages and diverse traditional cultures would be difficult. This paper presents new survey and focus group data on attitudes to national identity among tertiary students in Vanuatu. The survey identifies areas of common attitudes towards nationalism and national identity, shared by both Anglophone and Francophone Ni-Vanuatu. However, despite the weakening ties between language of education and political affiliation over recent years, the findings suggest that there remain some key areas of strong association between socio-linguistic background, and attitudes to the nation, and national identity. These findings cast new light on the attitudes of likely future elites towards regional, ethnic, intergenerational and linguistic fault lines in Vanuatu and the challenges of building a cohesive sense of political community and national identity.

Does calibration reduce variability in the assessment of accounting learning outcomes?

Reliable, consistent assessment process that produces comparable assessment grades between assessors and institutions is a core activity and an ongoing challenge with which universities have failed to come to terms. In this paper, we report results from an experiment that tests the impact of an intervention designed to reduce grader variability and develop a shared understanding of national threshold learning standards by a cohort of reviewers. The intervention involved consensus moderation of samples of accounting students&rsquo; work, with a focus on three research questions. First, what is the quantifiable difference in grader variability on the assessment of learning outcomes in &lsquo;application skills&rsquo; and &lsquo;judgement&rsquo;? Second, does participation in the workshops lead to reduced disparity in the assessment of the students&rsquo; learning outcomes in &lsquo;application skills&rsquo; and &lsquo;judgement&rsquo;? Third, does participation in the workshops lead to greater confidence by reviewers in their ability to assess students&rsquo; skills in application skills and judgement? Our findings suggest consensus moderation does reduce variability across graders and also builds grader confidence.

Building Nature’s Safety Net 2014 : A decade of protected area achievements in Australia

The single most important asset for the conservation of Australia&rsquo;s unique and globally significant biodiversity is the National Reserve System, a mosaic of over 10,000 discrete protected areas on land on all tenures: government, Indigenous and private,including on-farm covenants, as well as state, territory and Commonwealth marine parks and reserves.THE NATIONAL RESERVE SYSTEMIn this report, we cover major National Reserve System initiatives that have occurred in the period 2002 to the present and highlight issues affecting progress toward agreed national objectives. We define a minimum standard for the National Reserve System to comprehensively, adequately and representatively protect Australia&rsquo;s ecosystem and species diversity on sea and land. Using government protected area, species and other relevant spatial data, we quantify gaps: those areas needing to move from the current National Reserve System to one which meets this standard. We also provide new estimates of financial investments in protected areas and of the benefits that protected areas secure for society. Protected areas primarily serve to secure Australia&rsquo;s native plants and animals against extinction, and to promote their recovery.BENEFITSProtected areas also secure ecosystem services that provide economic benefits forhuman communities including water, soil and beneficial species conservation, climatemoderation, social, cultural and health benefits. On land, we estimate these benefitsare worth over $38 billion a year, by applying data collated by the Ecosystem ServicesPartnership. A much larger figure is estimated to have been secured by marineprotected areas in the form of moderation of climate and impact of extreme eventsby reef and mangrove ecosystems. While these estimates have not been verified bystudies specific to Australia, they are indicative of a very large economic contributionof protected areas. Visitors to national parks and nature reserves spend over $23.6 billion a year in Australia, generating tax revenue for state and territory governments of $2.36 billion a year. All these economic benefits taken together greatly exceed the aggregate annual protected area expansion and management spending by all Australian governments, estimated to be ~$1.28 billion a year. It is clear that Australian society is benefiting far greater than its governments&rsquo; investment into strategic growth and maintenance of the National Reserve System.Government investment and policy settings play a leading role in strategic growth of the National Reserve System in Australia, and provide a critical stimulus fornon-government investment. Unprecedented expansion of the National Reserve System followed an historic boost in Australian Government funding under Caring for Our Country 2008&ndash;2013. This expansion was highly economical for the Australian Government, costing an average of only $44.40 per hectare to buy and protect land forever. State governments have contributed about six times this amount toward the expansion of the National Reserve System, after including in-perpetuity protected area management costs. The growth of Indigenous Protected Areas by the Australian Government has cost ~$26 per hectare on average, including management costs capitalised in-perpetuity, while also delivering Indigenous social and economic outcomes. The aggregate annual investment by all Australian governments has been ~$72.6 million per year on protected area growth and ~$1.21 billion per year on recurrent management costs. For the first time in almost two decades, however, the Australian Government&rsquo;s National Reserve System Program, comprising a specialist administrative unit and funding allocation, was terminated in late 2012. This program was fundamental in driving significant strategic growth in Australia&rsquo;s protected area estate. It is highly unlikely that Australia can achieve its long-standing commitments to an ecologically representative National Reserve System, and prevent major biodiversity loss, without this dedicated funding pool. The Australian Government has budgeted ~$400 million per year over the next five years (2013-2018) under the National Landcare and related programs. This funding program should give high priority to delivery of national protected area commitments by providing a distinct National Reserve System funding allocation. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Australia has committed to bringing at least 17 percent of terrestrial and at least 10 per cent of marine areas into ecologically representative, well-connected systems of protected areas by 2020 (Aichi Target 11).BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATIONAustralia also has an agreed intergovernmental Strategy for developing a comprehensive, adequate and representative National Reserve System on land andsea that, if implemented, would deliver on this CBD target. Due to dramatic recent growth, the National Reserve System covers 16.5 per cent of Australia&rsquo;s land area, with highly protected areas, such as national parks, covering 8.3 per cent. The marine National Reserve System extends over one-third of Australian waters with highly protected areas such as marine national parks, no-take or green zones covering 13.5 per cent. Growth has been uneven however, and the National Reserve System is still far from meeting Aichi Target 11, which requires that it also be ecologically representative and well-connected. On land, 1,655 of 5,815 ecosystems and habitats for 138 of 1,613 threatened species remain unprotected. Nonetheless, 436 terrestrial ecosystems and 176 threatened terrestrial species attained minimum standards of protection due to growth of the National Reserve System on land between 2002 and 2012. The gap for ecosystem protection on land &ndash; the area needed to bring all ecosystems to the minimum standard of protection &ndash; closed by a very substantial 20 million hectares (from 77 down to 57 million hectares) between 2002 and 2012, not including threatened species protection gaps. Threatened species attaining a minimum standard for habitat protection increased from 27 per cent to 38 per cent over the decade 2002&ndash;2012. A low proportion of critically endangered species meeting the standard (29 per cent) and the high proportion with no protection at all (20 per cent) are cause for concern, but one which should be relatively easy to amend, as the distributions of these species tend to be small and localised. Protected area connectivity has increased modestly for terrestrial protected areas in terms of the median distance between neighbouring protected areas, but this progress has been undermined by increasing land use intensity in landscapes between protected areas.A comprehensive, adequate and representative marine reserve system, which meetsa standard of 15 per cent of each of 2,420 marine ecosystems and 30 per cent of thehabitats of each of 177 marine species of national environmental significance, wouldrequire expansion of marine national parks, no-take or green zones up to nearly 30per cent of state and Australian waters, not substantially different in overall extentfrom that of the current marine reserve system, but different in configuration.Protection of climate change refugia, connectivity and special places for biodiversityis still low and requires high priority attention. FINANCING TO FILL GAPS AND MEET COMMITMENTSIf the &lsquo;comprehensiveness&rsquo; and &lsquo;representativeness&rsquo; targets in the agreed terrestrial National Reserve System Strategy were met by 2020, Australia would be likely to have met the &lsquo;ecologically representative&rsquo; requirement of Aichi Target 11. This would requireexpanding the terrestrial reserve system by at least 25 million hectares. Considering that the terrestrial ecosystem protection gap has closed by 20 million hectares over the past decade, this required expansion would be feasible with a major boost in investment and focus on long-standing priorities. A realistic mix of purchases, Indigenous Protected Areas and private land covenants would require an Australian Government National Reserve System investment of ~$170 million per year over the five years to 2020, representing ~42 per cent of the $400 million per year which the Australian Government has budgeted for landcare and conservation over the next five years. State, territory and local governments, private and Indigenous partners wouldlikewise need to boost financial commitments to both expand and maintain newprotected areas to meet the agreed National Reserve System strategic objectives.The total cost of Australia achieving a comprehensive, adequate and representativemarine reserve system that would satisfy Aichi Target 11 is an estimated $247 million.

Conclusion : democratising the history of democracy

The aim of The Secret History of Democracy has been to open debate on a larger view of democratic practice than that encapsulated by its wellknown standard history. The book came about from a concern that, while democracy was experiencing an ascendancy that began in the aftermath of the Second World War and intensified with the end of the Cold War, the global uptake of this particular form of governance came at the very moment when its limitations were becoming clearer: in its European and American heartlands there was less interest in participating in democracy; Clinton began in hope but ended in scandal; 9/11 was a victory for intolerance precisely because Western democracy restricted its own freedoms; the Bush, Blair and Howard governments became less relevant to their constituents and waged unpopular wars; the global financial crisis revealed democracy&rsquo;s dependence on a flawed economic model; and difficulties in dealing with the global impact of climate change showed the limitations of national democracies, hostage to sectional interests. The exemplars of democracy were not having an easy time.

Interview with Boediono, former Vice President of Indonesia

Boediono studied and worked in Australia on several occasions. He studied at the University of Western Australia in the 1960s on a Colombo Plan scholarship, completing a degree in economics in 1967. He then went on to complete a Masters degree at Monash University. He later obtained a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s and also worked at the Australian National University as a research assistant. Boediono was a Bank of Indonesia deputy governor from 1997 to 1998 and served as State Minister of National Planning and Development from 1998 to October 1999. He served as Vice President of Indonesia 2009-2014 and has worked as an academic, teaching economics at Gadjah Mada University. The interview was conducted in English on 23 April 2014 by Professor David Lowe and Dr Jemma Purdey of Deakin University. This set comprises: an interview recording, a photograph, and a transcript of the interview.

The Australian middle class and education: a small-scale study of the school choice experience as framed by ‘My School’ within inner city families

With the launch of the &lsquo;My School&rsquo; website in 2010, Australia became a relative latecomer to the publication of national school performance comparisons. This paper primarily seeks to explore the school choice experience as framed by &lsquo;My School&rsquo; website, for participating middle-class families. We will draw on Bourdieusian theory of cultural capital and relationship networks and Australian-based school choice research in order to contribute to understandings regarding the application of &lsquo;My School&rsquo; data within participating families. Data collection consisted of qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with five families, each based within inner-city suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria. The findings of this small-scale study indicate that participating middle-class families possessed highly developed strategies for locating and achieving enrolment in school-of-choice and therefore did not seek to apply available data on &lsquo;My School&rsquo; to decision-making, despite each participant reviewing the available data.

Functionalism, co-operation, good faith, and the making of the "daily-preventive justice" in contract law theory and practice. A contribution to a rational understanding of good faith and to its future reseasonable developments. Evaluations from

The thoughts and observations contained in this paper were first presented in a preliminary form at the Staff Seminar that I gave at the University of Cape Town (UCT) - Department of Private Law, on Tuesday May 8 2012. The organizers generously offered me a free choice of subject. Such an offer always poses a problem to imaginative people like myself. I finally chose as my subject the role of good faith in contract law theory and practice and then entitled the Seminar &ldquo;Good Faith &amp; Contracts - Brothers in Arms&rdquo;. The aim of the talk was to briefly describe what I see behind the doctrine of good faith (and, more broadly, behind the general course of the parties&rsquo; behavior before and after the conclusion of an agreement), to then explain the need of its protection and future reasonable developments by challenging the limitations of both traditional and current legal approaches to contract law theory and practice. By adopting a comparative modus investigandi, it emerged that especially in the area of contract law a new law-finding process is emerging in the European continent and it is leading to re-conceive the meta-national legislative interventions by challenging the limits of Hobbes&rsquo;s Leviathan. As asserted, we ought to not take this process for granted because although there are many forms of social organization, contract is the most pervasive and the law of contract still is the most important vehicle to support and supplement private arrangements. However, the point of departure for theorizing about private law is based on experience. Consequently, despite the growing emphasis on the convergence of national legal systems in Europe, conducting research on private law theory and practice requires that imagination and creativity be matched with prudence. Proficiency has to be aligned with what we have learned from history.

Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi christmas

A trend in studies about National Socialism and religion in recent years argues for a deliberate distinction between the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and the antisemitic v&ouml;lkisch movement of nineteenth-century Germany. This article challenges that contention. Several researchers have published comprehensive studies on the heterogeneous nature of Christian responses to the Nazis, but a comparable approach looking at how the Nazis viewed religion has not yet been undertaken. A study of the latter type is certainly necessary, given that one of the consistent features of the v&ouml;lkisch movement was its diversity. As Roger Griffin has argued, a &ldquo;striking feature of the sub-culture . . . was just how prolific and variegated it was . . . [T]he only denominator common to all was the myth of national rebirth.&rdquo; In short, the v&ouml;lkisch movement contained a colorful, varied, and often bewildering range of religious beliefs.