Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources: annual report 2015-16

I am pleased to report on the progress made in 2015-16 by the Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources (DEDJTR), towards our goal of improving the living standards and wellbeing of Victorians. The department has been operating for 18 months. In the first six months, we began implementing many of the Victorian Government’s policy and election commitments. We established our new department and developed possible initiatives for the government to consider later in the parliamentary term. 2015-16 saw an acceleration of delivery, planning for the future, responses to major contingencies, and a consolidation of our new organisational design. For example, we responded to drought, fire recovery, blue-green algae outbreaks, the downturn in dairy prices and an unexpected rate of wheel wear on V/Line trains. We advised on our expectations of economic and industry transformation, population growth, technological disruption and workforce changes. &nbsp

How Free Is Sow Stall Free? Incremental Regulatory Reform and Industry Co‐optation of Activism

This article critically examines how interactions between social movement activism, supermarkets, and the pork industry led to the voluntary adoption of “sow stall free” standards in Australia. We “backwards map” the regulatory space behind “sow stall free” products to show how the movement against factory farming became selectively focused on the abolition of one form of confinement for sows, rather than other forms of confinement and the conditions of the sows’ offspring, the piglets that are consumed. We argue that this facilitated an incremental shift to “sow stall free” production, allowing the concept of pig welfare to be corporatized in a way that maintains the dominant model of factory farmed pig meat production