Refocusing the Australian Army

Recent operations have distracted the Army from being best postured for regional engagement.1 As the Afghanistan commitment winds down, the Army will need to overcome this neglect by shifting its primary focus to regional priorities, where geographic determinants and great power dynamics will feature. The maturation of defence infrastructure and capability projects dating back to the 1980s, coupled with capabilities entering service soon, means that the Australian Defence Force (ADF), and the Army in particular, has a strong foundation from which to refocus on engagement with regional forces, albeit with some exceptions. For instance, recent operations have demonstrated the need for sound intelligence support and a pool of language-trained and culturally-aware personnel, but regionally-oriented skills in these areas have atrophied. Beyond maintaining broad capabilities for a wide range of contingencies, the key to ensuring the Army‟s successful reorientation will be a regionally-focused reinvestment in intelligence, language and culture skills

Closer Australia-Canada defence cooperation?

This is the third and final paper in a series commissioned for a project that ASPI has been jointly running with Canada’s Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). The project explores the rationale for and possible mechanisms of closer Australia–Canada defence and security cooperation in the Asia–Pacific. The paper is authored by John Blaxland. This paper examines the prospect and utility of closer defence cooperation for both Canada and Australia. It reflects on commonalities and like-mindedness, particularly as they concern regional security and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Forward-looking measures are presented for Canadian and Australian defence policymakers to capitalise on each other’s strengthsand similarities. A visionary understanding of the two countries’ shared heritage and common interests is called for, but Canada has to demonstrate how serious it is about engagement in the region. Closer bilateral engagement should be considered in three areas: bolstering regional engagement, cost-saving measures and enhancing engagement with great powers

State of the community service sector in NSW 2015

Based on survey data collected from leaders of 513 organisations, the report provides rich information about sector capacity, sustainability, and engagement with government. It shows the sector\u27s strengths as a collaborative, diverse and feminised industry. It also shows leaders\u27 perspectives on the challenges facing the sector. These include adapting to policy change and meeting social need at a time that many organisations are affected by funding loss, funding inadequacy, and funding insecurity. &nbsp

Everyday negotiations for care and autonomy in the world of welfare-to-work: The policy experience of Australian mothers, 2003-2006

A significant new direction in Australian income support policy was introduced in 2002. Known as Australians Working Together, this development changed the basis of social security entitlement for parents. Throughout most of the twentieth century, low-income sole mothers, and later sole fathers and parents in couple families, could claim income support throughout most of their children’s school years. The primary grounds for their entitlement were low income and parenting responsibilities. Australians Working Together introduced compulsory employment-oriented activities to Parenting Payment entitlement for parents whose youngest child had turned 13. This thesis investigates mothers’ experience of this new welfare system. Using Dorothy Smith’s ‘everyday life’ approach to research, it draws upon qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse Australians Working Together. The research is grounded in a longitudinal interview survey of Australian mothers of teenage children who were subject to these changes. The analysis moves from their experience outwards through the four levels of analysis in Williams and Popay’s welfare research framework. The thesis examines mothers’ day-to-day worlds, the opportunities and constraints they navigate, the policies and institutions which shape their opportunities, the political framing of those policies, and wider social and economic transformations. In their negotiation of the social security system, mothers are striving for recognition of autonomy and care. They want their capacity to determine for themselves how to live their lives to be acknowledged. They would like the social contributions they make through employment, education and voluntary work to be recognised. They struggle for their unpaid work caring for their families to be valued. They wish that they had sufficient material resources to care well for their families. The thesis develops a theoretical framework to examine these struggles drawing on the work of Honneth, Fraser, Lister, Sennett, Fisher and Tronto, Daly and Lewis. This multi-level, everyday life analysis reveals the possibility of reframing the social security system around mutual respect

Game-changer in the Pacific: Surprising Options Open Up with the New Multi-purpose Maritime Capability

Compelling reasons for developing and maintaining a robust amphibious force as part of the ADF‟s suite of military capabilities are not hard to find. They are based on sound liberal and realist imperatives for Australian leadership in the Pacific and beyond to foster and maintain regional security and stability. Experience after the Indian Ocean Tsunami and repeated deployments off the coast of Fiji is instructive, but so is Australia‟s experience dating back for a century, considered briefly in this article. That experience suggests a robust amphibious capability could make a significant difference to Australia‟s regional diplomatic leverage, providing relatively significant hard power to complement the government‟s diplomatic soft power in support of the nation‟s humanitarian, liberal-democratic and realist instincts

IMAGINING SWEETER AUSTRALIA-INDONESIA RELATIONS

Australia’s relationship with Indonesia has been a bit like the board game “Snakes and Ladders”. Incremental progress in the relationship (up the ladder) is easily undone (down the snake) over a range of misunderstandings including issues like beef, boats, spies, clemency, Timor and Papua. Both countries have considerable overlapping interests. They both have to find a way to deepen and broaden the bilateral relationship to prevent this cycle from continuing to recur. In considering how to do that, understanding how they got here is important. Bilateral and multilateral engagement, on trade, education, and security including through IA-CEPA, links like the Ikahan network, additional New Colombo Plan engagement and a MANIS regional maritime cooperation forum may help make that happen

Myanmar: Time for Australian Defence Cooperation

Change is coming quickly in Myanmar and countries like the United States and Australia are edging towards closer and more meaningful engagement. A key institution needing reform is the Burmese military, the Tatmadaw, but to date this has been off-limits. To affect reform in Myanmar requires engagement with and understanding of the Tatmadaw. Where such engagement has been tried elsewhere in South East Asia through the Defence Cooperation Program it has produced modest and positive results. Meanwhile, other regional powers are recognising the geo-strategic significance of Myanmar, astride India and China, and are engaging the Tatmadaw accordingly. Australia is not so distant either and likewise has a vested interest in some modest and discrete engagement with the Tatmadaw

Everyday negotiations for care and autonomy in the world of welfare-to-work: The policy experience of Australian mothers, 2003-2006

A significant new direction in Australian income support policy was introduced in 2002. Known as Australians Working Together, this development changed the basis of social security entitlement for parents. Throughout most of the twentieth century, low-income sole mothers, and later sole fathers and parents in couple families, could claim income support throughout most of their children’s school years. The primary grounds for their entitlement were low income and parenting responsibilities. Australians Working Together introduced compulsory employment-oriented activities to Parenting Payment entitlement for parents whose youngest child had turned 13. This thesis investigates mothers’ experience of this new welfare system. Using Dorothy Smith’s ‘everyday life’ approach to research, it draws upon qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse Australians Working Together. The research is grounded in a longitudinal interview survey of Australian mothers of teenage children who were subject to these changes. The analysis moves from their experience outwards through the four levels of analysis in Williams and Popay’s welfare research framework. The thesis examines mothers’ day-to-day worlds, the opportunities and constraints they navigate, the policies and institutions which shape their opportunities, the political framing of those policies, and wider social and economic transformations. In their negotiation of the social security system, mothers are striving for recognition of autonomy and care. They want their capacity to determine for themselves how to live their lives to be acknowledged. They would like the social contributions they make through employment, education and voluntary work to be recognised. They struggle for their unpaid work caring for their families to be valued. They wish that they had sufficient material resources to care well for their families. The thesis develops a theoretical framework to examine these struggles drawing on the work of Honneth, Fraser, Lister, Sennett, Fisher and Tronto, Daly and Lewis. This multi-level, everyday life analysis reveals the possibility of reframing the social security system around mutual respect

Still waters run deep: Community-based water management as a case for ethnofederalism in Afghanistan

This thesis explores how, for more than four millennia, neighboring Afghan tribal communities have exercised highly decentralized, community-based freshwater management practices. I argue that these practices can act as both a model for how to structure Afghan polity at large as well as a global lesson in environmental resource management. The staying-power of these highly decentralized institutions is especially confounding for US policymakers because despite enduring nearly three decades of unrelenting violent conflict, these community-based freshwater management practices have remained a bulwark against modern western capitalist expansionism. These management practices are exceptionally resilient because they draw their strength from the people-to-people relationships they create and because they place the decision-making power firmly in the hands of the community. These time-honored practices are under attack by economic intervention from western capitalists and the structural adjustment schemes needed for its entrenchment. Using these community-based freshwater management practices as a model for Afghanistan\u27s political organization at large, I recommend ethnofederalism with consociational power sharing at the center because it fits Afghanistan\u27s specific cultural and environmental considerations. The decentralized nature of this strategy also leaves the decision-making power firmly in the hands of the tribal communities