The changing role of local government in Australia : National survey findings

[Extract] The aim of this report is to analyse public perceptions on the changing role of local government in Australia. Exploring how the Australian public views and understands the expansion of local government activity, from the Three Rs to a more expansive if still limited tier of government, offers crucial insights about the sector’s current state and future direction. This report presents the findings from a new national survey of 1,350 respondents who were asked what they saw the role local government to be, what services the sector should deliver, and whether acting on controversial issues to do with national identity, refugee support, and climate change, for example, should be within local government’s remit

The Three Rs and Beyond : Public Perceptions on the Role of Australian Local Government Today

Despite the growing consensus among local government scholars and practitioners that the sector has now moved beyond the ‘Three Rs’, there remains a trenchant perception in public debate that when local councils do more than provide the narrow range of local services to property they are overreaching. But to what extent are these views actually reflective of Australian public opinion? This article reports on the findings of a new national survey and analyses public perceptions on the changing role of local government in Australia. It reaches three key findings. The first is that Australians have now largely outgrown the three longstanding ideological underpinnings of Australian urban politics. The second is that Australians increasingly have an appetite for local government to address contentious cultural and political issues. Finally, the third is that local council category had little effect in determining how residents conceived of the role of local government

‘Living in crisis’: Introduction to a special section

[Extract] This special section began to take shape sometime in mid-2020. Much of Australia was then in lockdown, we were working from home, national borders were closed, and it was looking increasingly likely that the annual conference for The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) would not go ahead. At the time, the spread of COVID-19 within Australia was very limited, especially compared to much of the rest of the world. Yet the pandemic had nonetheless brought unprecedented disruption to our everyday lives

Enhancing perceptions of employability amongst first-year arts students and implications for student belonging

Despite being a degree that leads to diverse employment in a wide range of industries, the Bachelor of Arts (BA) has long had a bad reputation when it comes to employment outcomes for graduates. The challenge of overcoming this disjuncture has significant implications for current and prospective BA students, especially with respect to attrition and student satisfaction. In this article, we examine whether interventions that highlight the professional outcomes of the BA have the potential to enhance students’ perceived job prospects and sense of belonging in their study. Specifically, we sought to explore whether careers-focused events that introduce Arts students to professionals with a BA qualification can enhance their perceptions of employability and whether these enhanced perceptions of employability help improve their sense of belonging. The findings confirmed that students enrolled in generalist degrees like the BA do have lower perceived future career prospects, but that careers-focused interventions can enhance perceived career prospects as well as produce a higher sense of student belonging

On haunted geography: writing nation and contesting claims in the ghost village of Lifta

This essay explores the case of Lifta, a 'ghost village' located just outside of Jerusalem which has recently emerged as a poignant site of Israeli-Palestinian national contestation. The last remaining depopulated village from the 1948 Palestinian Catastrophe (al-Nakba), Lifta has been slated for 'redevelopment' since 2004: a plan that would see the village replaced by a luxury, Jewish-only residential and commercial complex. Employing the dual analytical lens of haunting and imagined geography, this essay examines Lifta as an instance of 'haunted geography' in which settler colonial attempts to write nation are always confronted by what is written underneath. Not only is Lifta a stark fissure in Israeli imagined geographies of nation, in that it speaks to an alternate geography which calls into question the former's legitimacy, but also the attempt to Judaize Lifta has provoked the 'ghosts' of the past. These ghosts demonstrate both the past's continuing legacy inthe present and the impossibility of erasing Palestinian claims and memories. With counter-calls for Lifta to become a site of commemoration, I argue that the village has come to be representative of a reconciliatory futurity in Israel-Palestine. This reconciliatory futurity paradoxically derives from the demand to recognize and engage with past injustice; namely, the ongoing historical effects of the Nakba. In Lifta, then, that which haunts underneath becomes a landscape for reconciliation - and a space from which future possibilities of reconciliation may be landscape

Gender, political citizenship and intersectional feminism in Australia : #MeToo and the March 4 Justice

This chapter explores the changing dynamics of gender and political citizenship in Australia through the lens of the 2021 March 4 Justice, which saw over 110,000 women and supporters attend rallies across the country to demand justice for survivors of sexual assault and an end to gendered violence. Partially inspired by #MeToo, the movement targeted the failure of the Australian Federal Parliament to adequately respond to high-profile allegations of sexual assault, abuse and misconduct within parliament. The March 4 Justice reflects important continuities with the historical trajectory of the women’s movement in Australia which has tended to focus on female participation and representation in the state and formal political institutions. At the same time, it reveals the emerging influence of intersectional and transnational feminisms in the contemporary Australian women’s movement. First, the chapter shows how the March 4 Justice explicitly sought to recognise how multiple identities and multiple intersecting oppressions shape experiences of gendered violence and consciously aimed to move beyond the historical dominance of white women by incorporating concerns related to race, class, religion, dis/ability, gender and sexuality. Second, the chapter highlights how transnational developments and movements such as #MeToo can reinvigorate and rejuvenate local struggles and activism

Performing colonial sovereignty and the Israeli “separation” wall

As a structure that does not mark an actual border and is constructed primarily on occupied territory, the Israeli 'separation' wall is a unique space that functions as both border and borderlands. Here, I explore the wall as a performance of sovereignty which simultaneously constructs and de-constructs imaginings of the Israeli nation-state. On the one hand, I contend that the wall is a colonial production that draws a psychic line between a 'civilised in here' and 'uncivilised out there', fulfilling the double function of forging a perceived bounded, protective national enclosure at the same time as buttressing the necessity of controlling territory beyond the bounds of that enclosure. On the other hand, I argue that the complex relationship between settler and state materialised in the wall points to a blending of theology and politics in Israel, which threatens to empower a God-sanctioned politics that undermines state. In addition to promoting anxiety of the Palestinian 'out there', then, the wall is understood as also fostering an anxiety increasingly turned inward to the structures of the Israeli state itsel

Messianic time, settler colonial technology and the elision of Palestinian presence in Jerusalem's historic basin

Advancing the settler colonial paradigm through a temporal perspective on territoriality, this article argues that the Jewish messianic idea is a distinctive feature of Israeli settler colonialism and an important element of Zionist territorial production. Specifically, the article contends that messianic time constitutes a specific settler colonial technology of domination which finds place-based expression in the ‘historic basin’ of occupied East Jerusalem. This is illustrated through two sites: the City of David archaeological park in the Palestinian village of Silwan and the Temple Mount/Haram al-Shariff, current home of the Dome of the Rock and prophesised location of the Third Jewish Temple. Both are at the frontier of settlement in the historic basin and the messianic conception of a mythical past and redemptive future aids claims to territorial exclusivity by ‘disappearing’ Palestinians in the present. The article concludes by reflecting on the value of an analytical focus on time for settler colonial scholarship on Israel-Palestine and in political geography more broadly