Australian media ethics regime and ethical risk management

Media organizations are simultaneously key elements of an effective democracy and, for the most part, commercial entities seeking success in the market. They play an essential role in the formation of public opinion and the influence on personal choices. Yet most of them are commercial enterprises seeking readers or viewers, advertising, favorable regulatory decisions for their media, and other assets. This creates some intrinsic difficulties and produces some sharp tensions within media ethics. In this article, we examine such tensions—in theory and practice. We then consider the feasibility of introducing an ethics regime to the media industry—a regime that would be effective in a deregulated environment in protecting public interest and social responsibility. In the article, we also outline a rationale and a methodology for the institutionalization of an acceptable and workable media ethics regime that aims to protect the integrity of the industry in a future of undoubtedly increasing commercial pressure.

Questions of English : ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and the formation of the subject in England, Australia and the United States

The impact and content of English as a subject on the curriculum is once more the subject of lively debate. Questions of English sets out to map the development of English as a subject and how it has come to encompass the diversity of ideas that currently characterise it. Drawing on a combination of historical analysis and recent research findings Robin Peel, Annette Patterson and Jeanne Gerlach bring together and compare important new insights on curriculum development and teaching practice from England, Australia and the United States. They also discuss the development of teacher training, highlighting the variety of ways in which teachers build their own beliefs and knowledge about English.

Teaching crabs to walk straight : is there a place for ethics education in Malaysian accountancy courses?

Recent releases from the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) highlight the importance of ethics education. Academic institutions employ varying methods of teaching ethics and place varying levels of emphasis on ethics teaching during a business/accounting degree. This paper attempts to evaluate whether teaching ethics to final year accountancy students is beneficial. At the commencement of a semester 85 final year accounting students were given five ethical scenarios on which to make an ethical decision. During the semester they were subject to two different methods of teaching ethics, a traditional lecture/tutorial process and a group assignment. ----- After a significant gap, students were re-presented with the ethical scenarios and asked what action they now considered appropriate. In all five instances students offered a more ethical response the second time. When asked to evaluate the methodologies the students considered both training methods to have a positive effect on their ethical thinking. The results suggest it is beneficial to include ethics teaching in accountancy courses, if the profession’s goal of ethical practitioners is to be achieved.

Professional Responsibility and Legal Ethics in Queensland

With the commencement of the Legal Profession Act 2007 (Qld) and the establishment of the Legal Services Commission, the legal profession and legal services market in Queensland has experienced significant changes to its regulatory environment. Professional Responsibility and Legal Ethics in Queensland provides a detailed explanation and analysis of these changes. The book will assist lawyers to plan for successful practice within this new environment by examining such topics as: • The scope and application of key provisions within the Legal Profession Act; • The role, functions and policies of the Legal Services Commission; • The ethical and regulatory implications of operating as an Incorporated Legal Practice or as a Multi-Disciplinary Partnership; • Developments affecting trust accounts and client money dealings more generally; • Recent case law, Tribunal decisions and Legal Services Commission guidelines in relation to the new conduct standards of Unsatisfactory Professional Conduct and Professional Misconduct; and • The impact of the new legislation and regulatory environment on a range of traditional ethical duty categories such as the duty to communicate, costs and billing practices, as well as the paramount duties to the court and to the administration of justice. An invaluable reference for legal professionals, this book is also an important resource for law students grappling with questions raised by legal ethics and their application to the workplace.

Listening to late discovery adoption and donor offspring stories : adoption, ethics and implications for contemporary donor insemination practices

For most of the 20th Century a ‘closed’ system of adoption was practised throughout Australia and other modern Western societies. This ‘closed’ system was characterised by sealed records; amended birth certificates to conceal the adoption, and prohibited contact with all biological family. Despite claims that these measures protected these children from the taint of illegitimacy the central motivations were far more complex, involving a desire to protect couples from the stigma of infertility and to provide a socially acceptable family structure (Triseliotis, Feast, & Kyle, 2005; Marshall & McDonald, 2001). From the 1960s significant evidence began to emerge that many adopted children and adults were experiencing higher incidences of psychological difficulties, characterised by problems with psychological adjustment, building self-esteem and forming a secure personal identity. These difficulties became grouped under the term ‘genealogical bewilderment’. As a result, new policies and practices were introduced to try to place the best interests of the child at the forefront. These changes reflected new understandings of adoption; as not only an individual process but also as a social and relational process that continues throughout life. Secrecy and the withholding of birth information are now prohibited in the overwhelming majority of all domestic adoptions processed in Australia (Marshall & McDonald, 2001). One little known consequence of this ‘closed’ system of adoption was the significant number of children who were never told of their adoptive status. As a consequence, some have discovered or had this information disclosed to them, as adults. The first study that looked at the late discovery of genetic origins experiences was conducted by the Post Adoption Resource Centre in New South Wales in 1999. This report found that the participants in their study expressed feelings of disbelief, confusion, anger, sorrow and loss. Further, the majority of participants continued to struggle with issues arising from this intentional concealment of their genetic origins (Perl & Markham, 1999). A second and more recent study (Passmore, Feeney & Foulstone, 2007) looked at the issue of secrecy in adoptive families as part of a broader study of 144 adult adoptees. This study found that secrecy and/or lies or misinformation on the part of adoptive parents had negative effects on both personal identity and relationships with others. The authors noted that those adoptees who found out about their adoption as adults were ‘especially likely to feel a sense of betrayal’ (p.4). Over recent years, stories of secrecy and late discovery have also started to emerge from sperm donor conceived adults (Spencer, 2007; Turner & Coyle, 2000). Current research evidence shows that although a majority of couples during the donor assisted conception process indicate that they intend to tell the offspring about their origins, as many as two-thirds or more of couples continue to withhold this information from their children (Akker, 2006; Gottlieb, A. McWhinnie, 2001; Salter-Ling, Hunter, & Glover, 2001). Why do they keep this secret? Infertility involves a range of complex factors that are often left unresolved or poorly understood by those choosing insemination by donor as a form of family building (Schaffer, J. A., & Diamond, R., 1993). These factors may only impact after the child is born, when resemblance talk becomes most pronounced. Resemblance talk is an accepted form of public discourse and a social convention that legitimises the child as part of the family and is part of the process of constructing the child’s identity within the family. Couples tend to become focused on resemblance as this is where they feel most vulnerable, and the lack of resemblance to the parenting father may trigger his sense of loss (Becker, Butler, & Nachtigall, 2005).

Community engagement : exploring a relational approach to consultation and collaborative practice in Australia

Community engagement is increasingly being employed by Australian organizations as a key strategy to incorporate representative community opinions into decision-making. This trend is reflected by Australian local and state governments legislating for community consultation in major infrastructure projects and the increasing role of public relations practitioners to manage these programs. This study explores community engagement founded on relational theory and proposed a typology of engagement employing a relational framework. An exploratory study of 20 Australian infrastructure projects with a mandatory consultation component is analyzed applying this framework. Results indicate little discrimination between the terms engagement, consultation, and participation; however, a range of tactics supported both collaborative and advocacy approaches. The implications for adopting a relational framework for community engagement programs are discussed.

Journalism Ethics : Arguments and Cases

Hirst and Patching's second edition of Journalism Ethics: Arguments and Cases provides a fully updated exploration of the theory and practice of ethics in journalism. The authors situate modern ethical dilemmas in their social and historical context, which encourages students to think critically about ethics across the study and practice of journalism. Using a unique political economy approach, the text provides students with a theoretical and philosophical understanding of the major ethical dilemmas in journalism today. It commences with a newly recast discussion of theoretical frameworks, which explains the complex concepts of ethics in clear and comprehensive terms. It then examines the 'fault lines' in modern journalism, such as the constant conflict between the public service role of the media, and a journalist's commercial imperative to make a profit. All chapters have been updated with new examples, and many new cases demonstrating the book's theoretical underpinnings have been drawn from 'yesterday's headlines'. These familiar cases encourage student engagement and classroom discussion, and archived cases will still be available to students on an Online Resource Centre. Expanded coverage of the 'War on Terror', issues of deception within journalism, and infotainment and digital technology is included.

Regulating corporate governance in China and Hong Kong : do Chinese values and ethics have a place in the age of globalization?

Much has been said about the convergence of corporate governance and regulations. The underlying assumptions of this phenomenon are driven by globalisation and the dominance of the Anglo-US model of corporate governance. Since the Asian crisis in 1997, Hong Kong and perhaps to a less extend Mainland China, had amended both Company laws and Stock Exchange Listing Rules obligations, arguably, mirroring provisions and rules in the UK and US. However, there has been a small amount of literature in law drawing from cross cultural management asking the question - is Western governance and regulation appropriate for the East? This paper will approach this issue from a different mindset, instead of drawing distinctions about East and West, a meta-regulatory framework will attempt to incorporate Western ‗hard‘ and ‗soft‘ laws with Asian ethical values. The aim is to combine laws and ethics thereby enhancing corporate governance and, improve compliance of those rules by adapting Chinese ethical values like Confucianism into the regulatory system. The overarching goal of this exercise is to adapt the wisdom of Chinese ethics into regulatory guidelines to suit the modern global market.

Truth, obligation and ethics in the propagation of democracy

In this paper I present an analysis of the language used by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) on its website (NED, 2008). The specific focus of the analysis is on the NED's high usage of the word “should” revealed in computer assisted corpus analysis using Leximancer. Typically we use the word “should” as a term to propose specific courses of action for ourselves and others. It is a marker of obligation and “oughtness”. In other words, its systematic institutional use can be read as a statement of ethics, of how the NED thinks the world ought to behave. As an ostensibly democracy-promoting institution, and one with a clear agenda of implementing American foreign policy, the ethics of NED are worth understanding. Analysis reveals a pattern of grammatical metaphor in which “should” is often deployed counter intuitively, and sometimes ambiguously, as a truth-making tool rather than one for proposing action. The effect is to present NED's imperatives for action as matters of fact rather than ethical or obligatory claims.

Ethics on-the-run

Midwives are involved in a very dynamic profession. As they face their everyday tasks they encounter many different situations and a variety of people which results in a vast number of interactions. This narrative research project sought to identify some of the ‘ordinary’ encounters and interactions that midwives working in a hospital environment experience in their daily work and explore them from an ethical perspective. It found that many ethical decisions have to be made ‘on-the-run’, with no time to contemplate or decide what the best course of action might be. As ethics is embedded within every encounter a midwife has, it is essential that all midwives have an awareness and understanding of their own value systems, professional ethical codes and ethical principles that can act as guides when they have to make choices in these situations, which are frequently challenging.

Ethics and public health

Note: see later edition of this work at http://eprints.qut.edu.au/47632/ This chapter introduces you to the basic ethical principles that underpin public health practice. The themes to be considered in this chapter include: the characteristics of ‘ethics’, the justification for reflecting on ethics and values, the foundations of public health ethics, whether and how we can incorporate ethics and values into our practice and the nature of some of the potential ethical complications of public health practice.

The ethics of regional water planning : planning and management of water resources in a growth region

Abstract Providing water infrastructure in times of accelerating climate change presents interesting new problems. Expanding demands must be met or managed in contexts of increasingly constrained sources of supply, raising ethical questions of equity and participation. Loss of agricultural land and natural habitats, the coastal impacts of desalination plants and concerns over re-use of waste water must be weighed with demand management issues of water rationing, pricing mechanisms and inducing behaviour change. This case study examines how these factors impact on infrastructure planning in South East Queensland, Australia: a region with one of the developed world’s most rapidly growing populations, which has recently experienced the most severe drought in its recorded history. Proposals to match forecast demands and potential supplies for water over a 20 year period are reviewed by applying ethical principles to evaluate practical plans to meet the water needs of the region’s activities and settlements.

Artful shaping : the ethics of fictionalising oral history

The paper documents the development of an ethical framework for my current PhD project. I am a practice-led researcher with a background in creative writing. My project invovles conducting a number of oral history interviews with individuals living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. I use the interviews to inform a novel set in Brisbane. In doing so, I hope to provide a lens into a cultural and historical space by creating a rich, textured and vivid narrative while still retaining some of the essential aspects of the oral history. While developing a methodology for fictionalising these oral histories, I have encountered a derserve range of ethical issues. In particular I have had to confront my role as a writer and researcher working with other people’s stories. In order to grapple with the complex ethics of such an engagment, I examine the devices and stratedgies employed by other creative practioners working in similar fields. I focus chielfy on Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave (published in English in 1968) Dave Eggers’What is the what: The autobiography of Valentino Achek Deng, a novel (2005) in order to understand the complex processes of mediation invloved in the artful shaping of oral histories. The paper explores how I have confronted and resolved ethical considerations in my theoretical and creative work.

Tendering ethics : a study of collusive tendering from a marketing perspective

This thesis provides a behavioural perspective to the problem of collusive tendering in the construction market by examining the decision making factors of individuals potentially involved in such agreements using marketing ethics theory and techniques. The findings of a cross disciplinary literature review were synthesised into a model of factors theoretically expected to determine the individual's behavioural intent towards a set of collusive tendering agreements and the means of reaching them. The factors were grouped as internal cognitive (the individuals' value systems) and affective (demographic and psychographic characteristics) as well as external environmental (legal, industrial and organisational codes and norms) and situational (company, market and economic conditions). The model was tested using empirical data collected through a questionnaire survey of estimators employed in the largest Australian construction firms. All forms of explicit collusive tendering agreements were considered as having a prohibitive moral content by the majority of respondents who also clearly differentiated between agreements and discussions of contract terms (which they found to be a moral concern but not prohibitive) or of prices. The comparisons between those of the respondents that would never participate in a collusive agreement and the potential offenders clearly showed two distinctly different groups. The law abiding estimators are less reliant on situational factors, happier and more comfortable in their work environments and they live according to personal value and belief systems. The potential offenders on the other hand are mistrustful of colleagues, feel their values are not respected, put company priorities above principles and none of them is religious or a member of a professional body. The research results indicate that Australian estimators are, overall law abiding and principled and accept the existing codification of collusion as morally defensible and binding. Professional bodies' and organisational codes of conduct as well as personal value and belief systems that guide one's own conduct appear to be deterrents to collusive tendering intent and so are moral comfort and work satisfaction. These observations are potential indicators of areas where intervention and behaviour modification can increase individuals' resistance to collusion.