DOCSLIB.ORG

The Neo-Liberal Assault on Australian Universities and the Future of Democracy: the Philosophical Failure of a Nation

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Neo-Liberal Assault on Australian Universities and the Future of Democracy: the Philosophical Failure of a Nation Concrescence: The Australasian Journal of Process Thought The Neo-Liberal Assault on Australian Universities and the Future of Democracy: The Philosophical Failure of a Nation Arran Gare Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry, Swinburne University [email protected] Abstract—The transformation of universities from public institutions to transnational business enterprises has met with less resistance in Australia than elsewhere. Yet this transformation undermines the founding principles of Australian democracy. This democracy emerged in opposition to the classical form of free market liberalism that the neo-liberals have revived. The logical unfolding of social liberalism in Australia underpinned the development of both the system of wage fixing and the idea of public education as conditions for democracy. The lack of resistance to the destruction of democracy, as it was originally understood in Australia, by successive neo- liberal governments has been due largely to the decadent state of Australian universities. These had come to be dominated by a crude form of empiricist utilitarianism, making Australia peculiarly vulnerable to the ideologues of global free markets and the power of transnational corporations who have sought to transform language to equate the dominance of all facets of life by markets as a defence of democracy. Only through a recovery of the philosophical tradition upon which Australia was founded and the development of this tradition through process metaphysics, it is argued, can genuine democracy and Australia’s public institutions, be defended. Keywords—Australia, Democracy, education, Universities, Idealism, T.H. Green, Deakin, Murdoch, John Anderson, globalization, Wilhelm von Humboldt, neo-liberalism, process metaphysics. The Liberal Party Member of the Federal House of Australian Schools Commission and the Tertiary Representatives, Ian McPhee, was wrong when he Education Commission, have been abolished. More characterized the changes to Australian media laws broadly, the undermining of work conditions for in 1989, allowing more concentrated media employees, eliminating job security and demanding ownership, as ‘the last nail in the coffin of increasing work hours, have deprived most people democracy’. This was only part of a raft of changes of the economic security and time to participate in which have undermined democracy in Australia. political life. Perhaps the most insidious and There is no doubt that the change to media laws has corrosive change, however, has been the had dramatic effects. It has resulted in control by transformation of the education system. If there has the Murdoch Press of more than 70% of readership, been a last nail in the coffin of democracy, it has the almost complete elimination of investigative been this. journalism by newspapers and the taming of Justifying this claim, however, is no easy matter. journalists, whose employment positions have been People have come to accept that if we have two rendered precarious. At the same time the political parties contending for the emoluments of Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) has office by making slightly different promises at been neutered. Less commented upon but perhaps election time, we have a democracy. And freedom more significant, the professionalism of state and is now equated with having one’s life and property federal civil services has been undermined and their protected and being free from governments to ability to function crippled by politicization, choose for oneself what to buy or sell on the downsizing, outsourcing and endless restructurings. market, including who to employ and who to work Statutory commissions which provided objective for. It is not difficult to expose the incoherence of knowledge to governments and the public, such as equating democracy with political parties the Resource Assessment Commission, the competing for votes to achieve office in a society of Concrescence 2006 Vol.7 pp.20-40 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2006. Published on-line by the Australasian Association for Process Thought, a member of the International Process Network. THE NEO-LIBERAL ASSAULT ON AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 21 unconstrained markets. Democracy means, universities to business enterprises, they have most minimally, power in the hands of the people. It reason to oppose such subversion. But academics implies equality of power. Unconstrained markets educated the politicians and other power brokers inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth. And who have embraced market deregulation, based wealth is power. In an inegalitarian society where government on the ‘user pays’ principle, debunked elections are themselves conceived as an extension traditional notions of education and reduced of the market, politics is controlled by those with education to a business. It is not only the economics wealth (in the present case, mostly transnational faculties which have been responsible for the new corporations). So the domination of society by free political directions. The core assumptions markets must undermine democracy, and with it, underlying neo-classical economics, that humans freedom. And it is not difficult to find empirical are nothing but complex machines moved by evidence of this. But few people now have the appetites and aversions, that life is nothing but a capacity to question this debased notion of struggle for survival and sensuous gratification, and democracy or to take seriously or even envisage the that progress occurs through the struggle for possibility of a more robust form of democracy or a survival, is part of the dominant world-view which more substantial form of freedom. The equation of has been inculcated into generations of Australian democracy with free markets now frames every students by its academics. Traditions of thought public debate so that even those opposing its rejecting these assumptions have only a small implications have come to accept it as the frame foothold in Australian universities. And academics within which they must argue.1 traditionally (although with some exceptions) have been strongly cosmopolitan and suspicious of the My contention is that this equation of democracy nation-state,2 the upholding of which is the basic with the free operation of the market, now condition for defending its public institutions. Some embraced by the dominant factions in the major academics have defended, and most have acceded political parties in Australia and accepted by the to, the neo-liberal characterization of democracy general population, is relatively new. It is an and freedom. In the face of this, conservative ideology, forged by right-wing intellectuals after academics, defending the role of the university as the Second World War, promoted by media barons cultivating ‘the life of the mind’, have been able to and successfully promulgated throughout the world be dismissed with ease. as part of a struggle by a new transnational class associated with transnational corporations and One might have expected a more effective response institutions to subvert real democracy and from radical academics; but particularly in undermine real freedom in order to extend their Australia, radical intellectuals have been in a state power. As in George Orwell’s dystopia, 1984, this of crisis for some time. Contemptuous of the class has learnt that power can be gained by achievements of social democracy and having lost inverting the meaning of words, so they have their faith in the proletariat as saviours, many redefined democracy to portray the subversion of former Marxists have been contentedly discontent democratic institutions as the advance of to exhibit their superiority by pointing out that the democracy and freedom. In few places has this new inexorable advance of capitalism must inevitably international ruling class been more successful than dissolve national communities and commodify in Australia, and to a considerable extent, this is due knowledge, rendering past ideas of the university to the successful subversion of the education untenable. An even more cynical attitude has system. But given the perversion of language, how emerged among academics in the humanities, the could such a contention be defended? area most threatened by the new business model of the university. For highly reflective The role of Australian academics in this ideological poststructuralists, ‘the envisaged reshaping of offensive against democracy highlights the universities is seen as part of the intrinsic problem. Academics, at least those in the momentum of structures to which all—actors, humanities and social sciences, should have the onlookers and victims—are equally subjected.’3 clearest understanding of what is happening, and suffering grievously from the reduction of 2 1 This is examined and combated by Robert Birrell, A Nation For an analysis of ‘frames’ and how the New Right have of Our Own: Citizenship and Nation-building in Federation gained ideological dominance through controlling how political Australia, Melbourne: Longman, 1995. 3 debates are framed, see George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Universities and Postmodernism, The Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, Green Paper and Some Responses’, Scholars and Melbourne, Scribe Publications, 2005. Entrepreneurs: The Universities in Crisis, Simon Cooper, Concrescence 2006 Vol.7 pp. 20-40 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2006. ARRAN GARE 22 Incredulous of grand narratives, particularly grand It has become a major undertaking
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Rise of Syriza: an Interview with Aristides Baltas
    THE RISE OF SYRIZA: AN INTERVIEW WITH ARISTIDES BALTAS This interview with Aristides Baltas, the eminent Greek philosopher who was one of the founders of Syriza and is currently a coordinator of its policy planning committee, was conducted by Leo Panitch with the help of Michalis Spourdalakis in Athens on 29 May 2012, three weeks after Syriza came a close second in the first Greek election of 6 May, and just three days before the party’s platform was to be revealed for the second election of 17 June. Leo Panitch (LP): Can we begin with the question of what is distinctive about Syriza in terms of socialist strategy today? Aristides Baltas (AB): I think that independently of everything else, what’s happening in Greece does have a bearing on socialist strategy, which is not possible to discuss during the electoral campaign, but which will present issues that we’re going to face after the elections, no matter how the elections turn out. We haven’t had the opportunity to discuss this, because we are doing so many diverse things that we look like a chicken running around with its head cut off. But this is precisely why I first want to step back to 2008, when through an interesting procedure, Synaspismos, the main party in the Syriza coalition, formulated the main elements of the programme in a book of over 300 pages. The polls were showing that Syriza was growing in popularity (indeed we reached over 15 per cent in voting intentions that year), and there was a big pressure on us at that time, as we kept hearing: ‘you don’t have a programme; we don’t know who you are; we don’t know what you’re saying’.
    [Show full text]
  • Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1947–2016: a Retrospective Using Citation and Social Network Analyses
    Global Intellectual History ISSN: 2380-1883 (Print) 2380-1891 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgih20 Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1947–2016: a retrospective using citation and social network analyses Martin Davies & Angelito Calma To cite this article: Martin Davies & Angelito Calma (2018): Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1947–2016: a retrospective using citation and social network analyses, Global Intellectual History To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2018.1478233 Published online: 28 May 2018. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rgih20 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2018.1478233 Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1947–2016: a retrospective using citation and social network analyses Martin Davies a and Angelito Calma b aGraduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia; bWilliams Centre for Learning Advancement, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia ABSTRACT KEYWORDS In anticipation of the journal’s centenary in 2027 this paper provides Citation analysis; bibliometric a citation network analysis of all available citation and publication analysis; social network data of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1923–2017). A total analysis; philosophy; of 2,353 academic articles containing 21,772 references were Australasian Journal of Philosophy; Kumu collated and analyzed. This includes 175 articles that contained author-submitted keywords, 415 publisher-tagged keywords and 519 articles that had abstracts. Results initially focused on finding the most published authors, most cited articles and most cited authors within the journal, followed by most discussed topics and emerging patterns using keywords and abstracts.
    [Show full text]
  • A Life of Thinking the Andersonian Tradition in Australian Philosophy a Chronological Bibliography
    own. One of these, of the University Archive collections of Anderson material (2006) owes to the unstinting co-operation of of Archives staff: Julia Mant, Nyree Morrison, Tim Robinson and Anne Picot. I have further added material from other sources: bibliographical A Life of Thinking notes (most especially, James Franklin’s 2003 Corrupting the The Andersonian Tradition in Australian Philosophy Youth), internet searches, and compilations of Andersonian material such as may be found in Heraclitus, the pre-Heraclitus a chronological bibliography Libertarian Broadsheet, the post-Heraclitus Sydney Realist, and Mark Weblin’s JA and The Northern Line. The attempt to chronologically line up Anderson’s own work against the work of James Packer others showing some greater or lesser interest in it, seems to me a necessary move to contextualise not only Anderson himself, but Australian philosophy and politics in the twentieth century and beyond—and perhaps, more broadly still, a realist tradition that Australia now exports to the world. Introductory Note What are the origins and substance of this “realist tradition”? Perhaps the best summary of it is to be found in Anderson’s own The first comprehensive Anderson bibliography was the one reading, currently represented in the books in Anderson’s library constructed for Studies in Empirical Philosophy (1962). It listed as bequeathed to the University of Sydney. I supply an edited but Anderson’s published philsophical work and a fair representation unabridged version of the list of these books that appears on the of his published social criticism. In 1984 Geraldine Suter published John Anderson SETIS website, to follow the bibliography proper.
    [Show full text]
  • Prime Mover Or Facilitator?
    University of Wollongong Research Online Sir Richard Kirby Lectures in Industrial Relations Faculty of Business and Law 10-5-1988 The Arbitration Commission: Prime Mover or Facilitator? J. E. Isaac University of Melbourne Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kirby Recommended Citation Isaac, J. E., (1988), The Arbitration Commission: Prime Mover or Facilitator?, University of Wollongong, 1988, 28p. https://ro.uow.edu.au/kirby/1 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] The Arbitration Commission: Prime Mover or Facilitator? Description The Arbitration Commission: Prime Mover or Facilitator?, The Tenth Sir Richard Kirby Lecture in Industrial Relations, University of Wollongong, 5 October 1988. Delivered by Professor J.E. Isaac, University of Melbourne. Publisher University of Wollongong, 1988, 28p This serial is available at Research Online: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kirby/1 THE UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG THE ARBITRATION COMMISSION: PRIME MOVER OR FACILITATOR? The Tenth Sir Richard Kirby Lecture in Industrial Relations by Professor J.E. Isaac DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS JI-88-01 THE ARBITRATION COMMISSION: PRIME MOVER OR FACILITATOR? The Tenth Sir Richard Kirby Lecture in Industrial Relations University of Wollongong 5 October 1988 b y Professor J.E. Isaac University of Melbourne The Arbitration Commission: Prime Mover or Facilitator? It is a great honour and a very special pleasure to be giving the Tenth Sir Richard Kirby Lecture in Industrial Relations, the pleasure enhanced by the presence here tonight of Sir Richard himself and Lady Kirby.
    [Show full text]
  • Scrolls of Love Ruth and the Song of Songs Scrolls of Love
    Edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg Scrolls of Love ruth and the song of songs Scrolls of Love ................. 16151$ $$FM 10-13-06 10:48:57 PS PAGE i ................. 16151$ $$FM 10-13-06 10:48:57 PS PAGE ii Scrolls of Love reading ruth and the song of songs Edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York / 2006 ................. 16151$ $$FM 10-13-06 10:49:01 PS PAGE iii Copyright ᭧ 2006 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, me- chanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scrolls of love : reading Ruth and the Song of songs / edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2571-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8232-2571-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2526-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8232-2526-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Bible. O.T. Ruth—Criticism interpretation, etc. 2. Bible. O.T. Song of Solomon—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Hawkins, Peter S. II. Stahlberg, Lesleigh Cushing. BS1315.52.S37 2006 222Ј.3506—dc22 2006029474 Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1 First edition ................. 16151$ $$FM 10-13-06 10:49:01 PS PAGE iv For John Clayton (1943–2003), mentor and friend ................
    [Show full text]
  • Discrete and Continuous: a Fundamental Dichotomy in Mathematics
    Journal of Humanistic Mathematics Volume 7 | Issue 2 July 2017 Discrete and Continuous: A Fundamental Dichotomy in Mathematics James Franklin University of New South Wales Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm Part of the Other Mathematics Commons Recommended Citation Franklin, J. "Discrete and Continuous: A Fundamental Dichotomy in Mathematics," Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 7 Issue 2 (July 2017), pages 355-378. DOI: 10.5642/jhummath.201702.18 . Available at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol7/iss2/18 ©2017 by the authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. JHM is an open access bi-annual journal sponsored by the Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences and published by the Claremont Colleges Library | ISSN 2159-8118 | http://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/ The editorial staff of JHM works hard to make sure the scholarship disseminated in JHM is accurate and upholds professional ethical guidelines. However the views and opinions expressed in each published manuscript belong exclusively to the individual contributor(s). The publisher and the editors do not endorse or accept responsibility for them. See https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/policies.html for more information. Discrete and Continuous: A Fundamental Dichotomy in Mathematics James Franklin1 School of Mathematics & Statistics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, AUSTRALIA [email protected] Synopsis The distinction between the discrete and the continuous lies at the heart of mathematics. Discrete mathematics (arithmetic, algebra, combinatorics, graph theory, cryptography, logic) has a set of concepts, techniques, and application ar- eas largely distinct from continuous mathematics (traditional geometry, calculus, most of functional analysis, differential equations, topology).
    [Show full text]
  • Papers in History and Methodology of Analytic Philosophy
    Papers in History and Methodology of Analytic Philosophy Brian Weatherson March 5, 2014 Contents 1 What Good are Counterexamples? 1 2 Morality, Fiction and Possibility 20 3 David Lewis 46 4 Humean Supervenience 81 5 Lewis, Naturalness and Meaning 96 6 Centrality and Marginalisation 114 7 Keynes and Wittgenstein 128 8 Doing Philosophy With Words 144 9 In Defense of a Kripkean Dogma 152 Co-authored with Jonathan Ichikawa and Ishani Maitra Bibliography 161 What Good are Counterexamples? e following kind of scenario is familiar throughout analytic philosophy. A bold philosopher proposes that all Fs are Gs. Another philosopher proposes a particular case that is, intuitively, an F but not a G. If intuition is right, then the bold philosopher is mistaken. Alternatively, if the bold philosopher is right, then intuition is mistaken, and we have learned something from philosophy. Can this alternative ever be realised, and if so, is there a way to tell when it is? In this paper, I will argue that the answer to the rst question is yes, and that recognising the right answer to the second question should lead to a change in some of our philosophical practices. e problem is pressing because there is no agreement across the sub-disciplines of phi- losophy about what to do when theory and intuition clash. In epistemology, particularly in the theory of knowledge, and in parts of metaphysics, particularly in the theory of causation, it is almost universally assumed that intuition trumps theory. Shope’s e Analysis of Knowl- edge contains literally dozens of cases where an interesting account of knowledge was jettisoned because it clashed with intuition about a particular case.
    [Show full text]
  • Phan Bội Châu and the Imagining of Modern Vietnam by Matthew a Berry a Dissertation Submitted in Partia
    Confucian Terrorism: Phan Bội Châu and the Imagining of Modern Vietnam By Matthew A Berry A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Wen-hsin Yeh, Chair Professor Peter Zinoman Professor Emeritus Lowell Dittmer Fall 2019 Abstract Confucian Terrorism: Phan Bội Châu and the Imagining of Modern Vietnam by Matthew A Berry Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Wen-hsin Yeh, Chair This study considers the life and writings of Phan Bội Châu (1867-1940), a prominent Vietnamese revolutionary and nationalist. Most research on Phan Bội Châu is over forty years old and is contaminated by historiographical prejudices of the Vietnam War period. I seek to re- engage Phan Bội Châu’s writings, activities, and connections by closely analyzing and comparing his texts, using statistical and geographical systems techniques (GIS), and reconsidering previous juridical and historiographical judgments. My dissertation explores nationalism, modernity, comparative religion, literature, history, and law through the life and work of a single individual. The theoretical scope of this dissertation is intentionally broad for two reasons. First, to improve upon work already done on Phan Bội Châu it is necessary to draw on a wider array of resources and insights. Second, I hope to challenge Vietnam’s status as a historiographical peculiarity by rendering Phan Bội Châu’s case comparable with other regional and global examples. The dissertation contains five chapters. The first is a critical analysis of Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Western research on Phan Bội Châu.
    [Show full text]
  • The Melbourne Spectrum
    Chapter 7 The Melbourne Spectrum T IS an old saying that philosophy begins with a sense of wonder. That is a source of philosophy, but there is another one, the sense Ithat ‘that’s all bullshit (and I can explain why)’. Different philoso- phers draw on these sources in differing proportions. An uncritical sense of wonder leads one out of philosophy altogether, into the land of the fairies, to start angels from under stones, find morals at every turn and hug the rainforest. A philosopher near the other extreme — or one, like David Stove, actually occupying the extreme — will at least still be doing philosophy, but it will consist entirely of criticism of others. In the Australian intellectual tradition, the wonder/criticism mix varies not only according to individuals but according to cities. At least, it has since 1927, when John Anderson arrived in Australia and Sydney and Melbourne set off on different paths. Various writers, mainly from Melbourne, have discoursed at some length on the con- trasts between the two cities in their styles of thought, and with all due allowance made for the hot air factor, there is undoubtedly some distinct difference to be identified. Where Sydney intellectuals, fol- lowing Anderson, tend to be critical, pessimistic, classical and opposed to ‘meliorist’ schemes to improve society, Melbourne’s unctuous bien pensants are eager to ‘serve society’, meaning, to instruct the great and powerful how they ought to go about achieving Progress and the perfection of mankind.1 Manning Clark — and it is characteristic of 1 J. Docker, Australian Cultural Elites: Intellectual Traditions in Sydney and Melbourne (Sydney, 1974); V.
    [Show full text]
  • Ji Richapd'sylvan WHAT IS WRONG with APPLIED ETHICS Richard
    197d /> << Ji p. I Richapd'Sylvan WHAT IS WRONG WITH APPLIED ETHICS Richard Sylvan There is much that is wrong with and in applied ethics. Specifically, there are three comprehensive counts where things are wrong with the commodity concerned, applied ethics, that is with applied ethics so economically viewed.1 Namely on the following three counts: • extraneous, with the supply, delivery, consumption, and the like of applied ethics, AE. The category prominently includes the delivery of applied ethics: what is done, taught and learnt, by whom, and how qualified (e.g. whether taught by professionals, professional ethicists or philosophers in particular). That has tended to presume that the commodity itself is more or less in order, though the presumption lacks good pedigree, delivery of defective goods being almost as ubiquitous as business enterprise. The present focus is not however upon the delivery, or other features of the production and consumption, packaging and marketing of the goods, but on features of the commodity itself, applied ethics itself. Thus • intraneous counts, concerning the commodity itself, where a further two things are wrong: •• the applied idea, and ••• what the application is presumed to be made to, established - or, should it be, establishment - ethics. Because an implicit premiss in organising the Philosophy and Applied Ethics Re-examined1 Conference seems to have been that the issues to be addressed are predominantly extraneous, and because most of the papers actually relevant to the Conference topic appear to focus on extraneous issues, the present exercise, by contrast, concentrates upon intraneous problems, especially the third: radical deficiencies in what is supposed to be applied, prevailing ethics, and some extensive repairs thereto.
    [Show full text]
  • Syriza's Rise and Fall
    Interview: New Masses—13 stathis kouvelakis SYRIZA’S RISE AND FALL Syriza won power in January 2015 as an anti-austerity party—the most advanced political opposition so far to the hardening deflationary poli- cies of the Brussels–Berlin–Frankfurt axis. Six months later, the Tsipras government forced through the harshest austerity package Greece had yet seen. This trajectory was a predictable outcome of the contradiction embod- ied in Syriza’s programme: reject austerity, but keep the euro. Why was Tsipras so incapable of envisaging a course inside the eu but outside the Eurozone, the position of Sweden, Denmark, Poland and half a dozen other European countries? irst, one shouldn’t underestimate the popularity of the euro in the southern-periphery countries—Greece, Spain, Portugal—for whom joining the eu meant accessing political and economic modernity. For Greece, in particular, it meant Fbeing part of the West in a different way to that of the us-imposed post- civil war regime. It seemed a guarantee of the new democratic course: after all, it’s only since 1974 that Greece has known a political regime similar to other Western countries, after decades of authoritarianism, military dictatorship and civil war. The European Community also offered the promise of combining prosperity with a social dimension, supposedly inherent to the project, which sealed the political com- pact that emerged after the fall of the Junta. Joining the euro seemed the logical conclusion of that process. Having the same currency as the most advanced countries has a tremendous power over people’s imagination—carrying in your pocket the same currency as Germans or Dutch, even if you are a low-paid Greek worker or pensioner—which new left review 97 jan feb 2016 45 46 nlr 97 those of us who’d been in favour of exiting the euro since the start of the crisis tended to underestimate.
    [Show full text]
  • Paid Parental Leave: an Investigation and Analysis of Australian Paid Parental Leave Frameworks with Reference to Selected European OECD Countries
    The University of Notre Dame Australia ResearchOnline@ND Theses 2018 Paid parental leave: An investigation and analysis of Australian paid parental leave frameworks with reference to selected European OECD countries Greg Lynn The University of Notre Dame Australia Follow this and additional works at: https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses Part of the Law Commons COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 WARNING The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further copying or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice. Publication Details Lynn, G. (2018). Paid parental leave: An investigation and analysis of Australian paid parental leave frameworks with reference to selected European OECD countries (Master of Laws by Research). University of Notre Dame Australia. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses/225 This dissertation/thesis is brought to you by ResearchOnline@ND. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses by an authorized administrator of ResearchOnline@ND. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The University of Notre Dame Australia School of Law PAID PARENTAL LEAVE: AN INVESTIGATION AND ANALYSIS OF AUSTRALIAN PAID PARENTAL LEAVE FRAMEWORKS WITH REFERENCE TO SELECTED EUROPEAN OECD COUNTRIES Greg Lynn LLB (Murdoch University) MA (The University of Notre Dame Australia) This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Master of Laws by Research 2018 DECLARATION This thesis does not, to the best of my knowledge, contain previously published or written material by another person except where due reference is made in the text, or any other material previously submitted for a degree in any other higher education institution.
    [Show full text]