Australian elections timetable as at 7 April 2014

This Research Paper provides a brief overview of the rules for determining the next Commonwealth, state, territory and local government elections. The paper lists the date of the next election where this is fixed, or where applicable, the earliest and latest possible dates on which it may occur

Commonwealth Parliament from 1901 to World War I

This paper provides an overview of Australia as a newly emerging ‘nation-state’ and the evolution of the federal Parliament by tracing the seven elections held from 1901 to 1918. Executive summary • The Commonwealth Parliament of Australia was just 13 years old when World War I broke out on 28 July 1914. • Prior to Federation in 1901, each Australian colony had been responsible for its own defence arrangements. At Federation, section 51(vi) of the Australian Constitution gave the new Commonwealth Parliament the power to make laws with respect to ‘the naval and military defence of the Commonwealth and of the several States’. The Governor-General became Australia’s Commander-in-Chief and the states transferred their naval and military forces to the Commonwealth of Australia under the control of the Department of Defence. • The Parliament passed Australia’s first Defence Act in 1903, empowering the Commonwealth Government to call up ‘unexempted’ males in times of war for home defence, but not for overseas service. When Parliament passed the Defence Act 1909, it paved the way for Australia’s first universal training scheme, which came into operation in 1911, requiring Australian males aged between 18 and 60 years to perform militia service within Australia and its territories. • The development of Australia’s defence policy was conditioned by the new nation’s reliance on Britain, the substantial cost in establishing and maintaining a navy, and Britain’s desire that the colonies should provide financial support for its own navy rather than establishing separate regionally-based fleets which could weaken central control in emergencies. By 1914, Australia had established the Royal Australian Navy and developed an independent system of military training from which could be drawn a citizen army of mainly conscripted soldiers. • Whilst the Parliament was not involved in Australia’s decision to go to war, it took an active role in shaping the new nation’s public safety and defence laws. In addition to war-related legislation, the Parliament also passed significant measures that were to have an enduring impact on Australia, including laws relating to income tax and the electoral system. • Between Federation and the end of World War I, 270 men had served in the Commonwealth Parliament. Of these, 23 saw active service in World War I, nine of whom were members of parliament at the time of their military service

Darwinian Domain-Generality: The Role of Evolutionary Psychology in the Modularity Debate

Evolutionary Psychology (EP) tends to be associated with a Massively Modular (MM) cognitive architecture. I argue that EP favors a non-MM cognitive architecture. The main point of dispute is whether central cognition, such as abstract reasoning, exhibits domain-general properties. Partisans of EP argue that domain-specific modules govern central cognition, for it is unclear how the cognitive mind could have evolved domain-generality. In response, I defend a distinction between exogenous and endogenous selection pressures, according to which exogenous pressures tend to select for domain-specificity, whereas the latter, endogenous pressures, select in favor of domain-generality. I draw on models from brain network theory to motivate this distinction, and also to establish that a domain-general, non-MM cognitive architecture is the more parsimonious adaptive solution to endogenous pressures

Religion, schooling, community, and security: exploring transitions and transformations in England

Education is a complex social practice. In the United Kingdom context, schooling is further nested within the complex social practices of community governance, quasi-market public choice, and religion. This essay explores the shifting definitions of community and education in the context of the Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015, which places a duty on all public bodies, including schools, to prevent violent extremism. Drawing on analyses of the “Trojan Horse” moral panic in Birmingham schools in 2014 and guidance documents operationalizing the educational policy changes that followed, two distinct discourses can be observed, derived from different policy directions. One discourse is the social, concerned with integration and at times assimilation toward national norms; and the other is the communal, concerned with internal cohesion and development within the Muslim community. These can be characterized as societal “we identities” in vertical tension (Buzan, 1998)

Researches in the economics of electric train movement

The problem of economically passing over a given distance in a given time as presented in railway operation with short distances between stations and comparatively high speeds, presents studies in the kinematics and kinetics of the subject which only recently have received the attention due them. This is the class of service to which,in the present state of the art, so called Electric Traction most commends itself, and is that to which the discussions in this thesis are principally applicable

Systemic functional adaptedness and domain-general cognition: broadening the scope of evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary Psychology tends to be associated with a massively modular cognitive architecture. On this framework of human cognition, an assembly of specialized information processors called modules developed under selection pressures encountered throughout the phylogenic history of hominids. The coordinated activity of domain-specific modules carries out all the processes of belief fixation, abstract reasoning, and other facets of central cognition. Against the massive modularity thesis, I defend an account of systemic functional adaptedness, according to which non-modular systems emerged because of adaptive problems imposed by the intrinsic physiology of the evolving human brain. The proposed reformulation of evolutionary theorizing draws from neural network models and Cummins’ (1975) account of systemic functions to identify selection pressures that gave rise to non-modular, domain-general mechanisms in cognitive architecture