Government Administration

The Australian Government's 'Caring for our Country' program has undermined Australia's 'regional model' for natural resource management, and eroded gains made under the precursor Natural Heritage Trust and related programs, in eight significant ways. Contrary to expectations that Caring for our Country, established in 2008, would build on the fo ....

Scope and Method of Study . Following the quality-of-life hedonic pricing approach of Rosen (1979) and Roback (1982) as extended to fiscal conditions by Gyourko and Tracy (1989; 1991), this paper examines how state and local government taxes and expenditures affect the location decisions of households and firms in U.S. nonmetropolitan a ....

Grouping regional towns and cities in Australia according to economic functions could improve understanding of the importance of economic factors in determining growth. Several researchers have used clustering techniques to examine the growth and characteristics of regional cities in Australia. The current study extends clustering methodologies b ....

Studies of regional identification are integral to the role of regionalism in political development, but how does one study regionalism when subnational political scales and regional political culture may be out of alignment? This question is tackled using Australia, a federation theorized as having possibly hit a regionalization 'ceiling effect' ....

This study presents a self-assessment tool and process that facilitate community capacity building and social learning for natural resource management. The tool and process provide opportunities for rural landholders and project teams both to self-assess their capacity to plan and deliver natural resource management (NRM) programs and to reflect ....

Wild dogs are a significant threat to Victoria’s livestock industry, at an estimated cost of $13–18 million per year. Their impact on productivity, animal welfare and social wellbeing requires an action plan to address the wild dog issue over the five years to 2019. This plan’s implementation is the responsibility of all stake ....

Housing affordability is a pressing social issue for many Australians with public housing stocks not coping with demand in recent years. Local government has a genuine capacity through partnerships with the other spheres of government as well as with private sector community housing and property developer interests, to playa key ro ....

Between 1960 and 1992 Australian state governments held numerous formal Inquiries into the question of appropriate local government boundaries. The deliberations and subsequent reports produced by these Inquiries provides an instructive and informative historical background to contemporary debates surrounding the controversial issue of local ....

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the infrastructure sector are agreements where private parties willingly agree to share responsibility with government agencies for (a subset of the following activities:) investment, finance, design, construction, renovation, maintenance, management, or operation of transportation facilities, e.g., ....

This is the introduction to the Ecology and Society special feature on “Applying Landscape Science to Natural Resource Management”. Primarily drawing upon examples from Australia, the nine papers in the feature illustrate how landscape science seeks to integrate information from diverse sources to generate management solutions for implementat ....

Key points • The ratio of local government own-source revenue to GDP is about 2 per cent. – The ratio of rates revenue (the only tax instrument of councils) to GDP decreased from 1.0 per cent to 0.9 per cent between 1990-91 and 2005-06. • Local governments in urban areas are predominantly funded from their own sources of revenu ....

The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives facilitated a workshop designed to assess the usability of existing disaster risk management tools for local governments. The aim is for local governments to work with their local communities to develop and implement Local Resilience Agendas in order to reduce vulnerabil ....

To maximise economic potential, we therefore need to be able to take maximum advantage of the possibilities generated by the NBN. So it is crucial that we understand the state of preparedness of businesses, and what needs to be done. Macquarie Telecom has therefore undertaken a survey of Australian businesses to advance our understanding of curre ....

Recent decades have seen significant developments in the role of mayors across the world. These developments have mirrored the widening international discourse on local governance and civic leadership, and are part of broader changes sweeping through local government. Australian local governments have been subject to wide‐ranging ref ....