Survey of the nature and extent of gambling and problem gambling in the ACT

Gambling participation and expenditure • Approximately 75% of surveyed ACT residents gambled last year with nearly 36% of gamblers participating on at least a weekly basis. • The highest levels of gambling expenditure were recorded for gaming machines and lotteries. • According to latest Tasmanian Gaming Commission statistics, total gambling expenditure by ACT residents in 1999-2000 was $209m

Hidden seeds : a political economy of working class women in Campbelltown, NSW

This thesis examines the political economy of working class women in contemporary Campbelltown (NSW). A broad political economic approach is employed that considers relevant social structures, their effects, and working class women’s responses to them. It includes investigation of material and non-material, subjective and objective, aspects of this dialectical relationship. This study argues the political agency of Australian working class women has rarely been acknowledged, let alone understood. The thesis focuses on working class women in the suburbs and their politics of everyday life. Though these women rarely attract political investigation, they are too often assumed to be passive, apathetic, unenlightened or conservative bearers of oppression. These stereotypes persist despite the variability in historical portrayals of working class women, suggesting working class women’s politics only makes sense in the context of their conditions of existence in specific times and places. The thesis makes a contribution towards the field of applied feminist political economy research. It employs a historical materialist approach to demystify working class women’s politics. The empirical heart of the project draws on in-depth interviews with local working class women about their experiences and views of family, community, politics, work, unemployment and social institutions. This qualitative material is set against a detailed local political economic analysis of contemporary Campbelltown. The interconnections of capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production in which working class women labour, survive and resist are explored. The thesis questions what part capitalism and socialism play in their pursuit of self and social emancipation. Understanding the political economy of working class women is fundamental to social and ecological health and sustainability. Questions of class power and conflict, and gendered distributions of work and poverty locate working class women at the core of these pressing concerns. The central hypothesis of this study is that working class women are engaged in a wealth of political strategies stemming from their everyday bid for survival. Their (often contradictory) collective and self-activity coalesces around a politics antithetical to the logic of capitalism because it depends on their exploitation and immiseration for its viability. Working class women practice and reproduce a politics of survival and hope that informs their hidden worlds of resistance

Capitalist (mis)representations and the political economy of working class Women in Campbelltown: a case study

A body of mainly socialist feminist literature has emerged since the 1980s concerning the existence of a political culture distinctive to working class women. These views rest upon a broader understanding of political economy as necessarily encompassing the contradictory elements of everyday life. Gibson-Graham approach the interrelationship of capitalist and noncapitalist activities in women’s lives from a poststructural feminist and postmodern Marxist perspective. They suggest that by inverting the linguistic and academic primacy accorded to capitalist practices over other economic forms, the hegemonic idea of capitalism as a singular and unified totality might be destabilised. The applicability and political implications of this approach are critically analysed through a biographical case study drawn from research on the political economy of working class women in Campbelltown on Sydney’s outskirts. It is argued that the availability of limited political resources and options is central to understanding working class women’s politics

Bradstow revisited' : a comparative study of class politics in Bowral, 1974 and 1997

This study revisits the Southern Highlands community of Bowral (NSW), the subject of Ronald Wild's political examination in the late 1960s. The paper commences with an assessment of changes in the local political economy, comparing contemporary socio-economic indicators and electoral data with Wild's findings. Little change is revealed in the patterns of social stratification or conservative political dominance between the two periods. In Wild's study elite theories were employed to explain the endurance of conservative parties in Bowral's inequitable social environment. The local working classes were accordingly cast as a passive, apathetic and ignorant lot, politically beholden to the local gentry and their class allies. This paper argues that these theories do not adequately explain why a social class seemingly votes against its interests. The lived experiences of Bowral's working classes received minimal attention in Wild's study. For the working classes, particularly the more isolated and resource starved constituents of rural Australia, the politics of survival closely shadows the world of electoral politics. A deeper understanding of the hidden politics of everyday life is crucial to our understanding of Australia's capitalist democracy. This paper highlights the bias in Australian political studies which continues to render much of contemporary working class politics invisible. It argues for studies in the political economy of everyday life to inform class analyses of communities, as an important adjunct to studies of institutionalised power

The environment-labour relationship : new directions for sociological thinking and research

This paper argues the case for a better sociological understanding of the interplay between the worlds of work (formal/informal, paid/unpaid, productive/reproductive) and environmental problems, particularly in the Australian context. This paper commences with a brief outline of some points of significance around the research terrain, followed by a snapshot of research at the subdisciplinary intersection of environmental sociology and the sociology of work, with particular reference to questions around the environment-labour relationship. In approaching the scholarship we have canvassed a number of prominent environmental sociology texts and examined the last five years of publication of the Australian Journal of Sociology and Journal of Industrial Relations. In general, we found the sociological literature on the environmental-labour relationship to be relatively undeveloped. Lastly, we consider a framework for advancing research on the environment-labour relationship that incorporates three interconnected sites of labour – the labour market, the household and the community. This kind of interconnected framework could usefully accommodate questions around how social divisions of labour and structures of labour inequality are connected to environmental issues, for example. This research agenda and praxis is vital if our collective environmental survival is to be secured in an enduring, equitable, inclusive, just and democratic manner

Emerging and Enduring Inequalities

The Australian Sociological Association Annual Conference 2012 will be a joint event including both TASA and the Sociological Association of Aotearoa New Zealand (SAANZ), including a special trans-Tasman plenary session