"A few good men": Public sector audit in the Swan River Colony, 1828-1835

The appointment of the Auditor General to undertake public sector audit is the primary instrument used to safeguard public finances in most contemporary Westminster-based democracies. It is axiomatic that the independence of the Auditor General from executive government is a critical element in ensuring the effectiveness of the role, yet this separation is a relatively recent phenomenon. Those responsible for nineteenth century public sector audit in the Australian colonies operated in what would today be considered an unacceptable environment, with little, if any, independence from the executive arm of government. Yet, while several other Australian colonies suffered from the mismanagement of government finances, there is nothing to show that the Swan River Colony experienced much more than clerical errors and minor administrative oversights. In this article, we explore the extent to which satisfactory public financial management in the Swan River Colony occurred as a result of both good financial management systems (in the context of the era) and the appointment of competent and ethical administrators – “a few good men”

The Oxford history of Australia

No abstract availabl

'Smarten up the Parents': Whose agendas are we serving? Governing parents and children through the Smart Population Foundation Initiative in Australia

This article critiques the Smart Population Foundation Initiative (SPFI), which was established to ‘bring parenting information and the science of child development to Australian parents and carers’ (Smart Population Foundation, 2006) and to satisfy the need for a credible and easily accessible source of information for parents. The article draws on the notion of modern governance developed by Rose and analyses the Initiative as a deeply political project. It looks at the Initiative from a critical distance created by the context of governmentality. The authors argue that the discourses produced by the Initiative constitute a particular notion of parent as ‘smart’ (lifelong learner, responsible and informed). These discourses govern parents through ‘ethopolitics’ to take up a certain art of parenting as their supposed free choice. Through standardising and sanctioning a particular way of acting as a parent, the SPFI translates governmental objectives into parents’ own values and practices. As a result, the discourse the SPFI constitutes about parenting effectively ‘shuts down’ multiple understandings of being a ‘good’ parent. Hence, parents’ conscious formation of their parenting practices are inhibited and with that, the ethical debates around this contentious issue are silenced

Secrets and lies: sex education and gendered memories of childhood's end in an Australian provincial city, 1930s-1950s

There are few historical studies about the sex education of Australian youth. Drawing on a range of sources, including the oral histories of 40 women and men who attended two single-sex, selective high schools in a provincial Australian city (Newcastle, New South Wales) in the 1930s-1950s, this paper explores the adolescent experience of sex education and gender relations. First, it outlines attempts by the New South Wales State Government and the Newcastle community to introduce sex education, especially during the moral panic about sexuality generated during World War Two. Second, it charts the experiential realm of growing up for adolescent females and males. Hegemonic gender ideology meant that sexual knowledge was mostly kept secret from adolescent girls, and that frightening lies about sexual matters proliferated in the vacuum created by sexual ignorance. For adolescent males, sexual knowledge, while still shrouded in myth and mystery, was more readily available. Indeed sex education classes were introduced at the boys' school in the 1950s, while the girls' school remained silent on the matter for the entire time. At the theoretical level, the paper suggests that the dominant ideology of femininity included sexual ignorance and was allied to the ideology of childhood innocence. Both ideologies were artefacts of patriarchal power

Resistance and race : Aboriginal child workers in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia

15 page(s