RegNet Newsletter
Vol. III, No.3
December 2002

1. CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS BANNED.

2. CONGRATULATIONS.

3. AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL SUCCESS.

4. RSSS REGNET OUTSIDE FUNDING PASSES $20 MILLION.

5. CENTRE FOR GAMBLING RESEARCH UNDERWAY WITH THREE ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS.

6. OTHER NEW APPOINTMENTS TO REGNET, RSSS.

7. REGNET PROFILES.

8. NEW REGNET BUILDING.

9. UPCOMING REGNET EVENTS.

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS BANNED

RegNet Chair John Braithwaite has announced that there will be an annual RegNet conference in the second week of December each year starting in 2003. 9-11 December 2003 was the likely date of the first conference. Your newsletter correspondent asked Braithwaite what would happen with the propensity of Australians to go to the beach at this time of year. “Well we would take a dim view of it”, he replied. When pressed whether shame would be enough to keep Australians from the beach in December, he replied “Yes”.

The idea is that we have an omnibus regulatory conference each year with panels on substantive fields of RegNet research like occupational health and safety, competition and consumer policy, restorative justice. But the point is that it would be a time each year when we make a special effort to listen to the ideas developing in fields other than our own. It would also be the best time to showcase our cross-cutting initiatives. Suggestions for a theme for the conference are invited. One suggestion has been: Regulation: The Nodal and the Global.

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CONGRATULATIONS

Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky

RegNet members Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, whose article "Is there a Duty to Vote?" (SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND POLICY, Winter 2000) has been awarded the Gregory Kavka/UCI Prize in Political Philosophy for 2003 by the American Philosophical Association. Geoff and Loren will officially receive the Kavka Prize at the Pacific Division Meetings in San Francisco March 26-30, 2003, where they will also participate in a special colloquium about their paper.

Janet Hope

RegNet PhD student in the Law Program, RSSS Janet Hope has won a major prize in a prestigious essay competition open to postgraduates, researchers, academics, teachers and other higher education professionals from all disciplines Australia-wide. The Co-op Bookshop Dialogica Awards, presented on 14 November, aim to encourage excellence in academic writing for the general public on topics of community interest. Janet received a prize of $5000, sponsored by APN Educational Media, for her essay on complexity and risk in biotechnology.

Helene Hwayeon Shin

Centre for Tax System Integrity PhD student Helene Hwayeon Shin is the only person in Australia among the 38 scholars who were successful in winning a fellowship from the Korea Foundation, one of the biggest funds set up by the Korean Department of Foreign Affairs to support scholars around the world conducting research on Korea.

Marian Sawer and Terry Hull

In the last round of ANU Promotions Round Program Coordinator Marian Sawer (Political Science Program) and Terry Hull, Senior Lecturer in the Demography and Sociology Program have both been Promoted to Professor.

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AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL SUCCESS

RegNet scholars have done particularly well in this year’s round of ARC grants. The biggest winners were RSSS RegNet professors Peter Grabosky and Clifford Shearing in collaboration with ACT Chief Police Officer (and REGNET Board Member) John Murray of the Australian Federal Police. They were awarded an ARC linkage grant totalling $971,424. In addition to this amount, the Australian Federal Police (ACT Policing) will contribute $264,000 in cash over the four year life of the project. The grant was one of the largest awarded in the 2002 round.

This project will design and evaluate an innovative policing strategy forthe Australian Capital Territory. The project team, including members of the Australian Federal Police, will conduct an exhaustive inventory ofmechanisms for informing and consulting the public, and for empowering communities in the co-production of public safety. It will design a framework using those mechanisms best suited to the ACT, and integrate thesewith existing strategies of restorative justice and intelligence-drivenpolicing. The project will evaluate the impact of the new policingstrategies on citizen satisfaction with police performance, perceptions of public safety, and measures of crime.This will be the first major project undertaken by the new Regnet Research Centre called Security 21, The international Centre for Security and Justice, co-directed by Professors Grabosky and Shearing.

The full list of ANU RegNet grant winners:

Peter Grabosky, Clifford Shearing, John Murray
Policing for the 21st Century
Total: $971,424

John Quiggin
Risk and Australian public policy
Total: $893,950

Bruce Chapman, Robert Breunig, Tom Crossley, Bob Gregory, Don Kenyon, Chris Ryan

Literacy and Numeracy, Schooling, Neighbourhoods and Labour Market Success
Total: $260,000

Barry Hindess, Peter Larmour
Transparency International and the Problem of Corruption
Total: $223,000

John Dryzek, Bob Goodin
The Theory and Practice of Deliberative Democracy
Total: $214,000

John Braithwaite, Christine Parker, Colin Scott, Niki Lacey
Meta-Regulation and the Regulation of Law
Total: $183,000.

Richard Johnstone, Michael Quinlan
The Implementation of Process regulation in Occupational Health and Safety: A Comparative Study of Policy and Practice
Total: $163,000

Chris Reus-Smit
Human Rights and the Transformation of Worlsd Politics
Total: $173,000

Nicola Piper
Asian Women, Migration and Transnational Governance from Below
Total: $117, 000

Andrew Hopkins
From Compliance to Mindfulness
Total: $77,899

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RSSS REGNET OUTSIDE FUNDING PASSES $20 MILLION

The 2002 ARC successes take outside fundraising by scholars with RegNet-funded appointments in RSSS to $21.1. million since 2001 when the ANU Institute of Advanced Studies Planning Committee first granted RSSS $500,000 per annum to seed RegNet posts.

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CENTRE FOR GAMBLING RESEARCH UNDER WAY WITH THREE ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS

Peter Grabosky has accepted an appointment as ANU’s first Professor for Gambling Research. This post is funded by an endowment from the ACT government. From April 2003, Professor Jan McMillen of the University of Western Sydney has accepted an offer to join Peter in the Centre and will take over the Directorship of the Centre at that time. David Marshall will also be joining the Centre as a postdoctoral fellow early 2003. See future issues of the newsletter for stories on the work of these scholars.

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OTHER NEW APPOINTMENTS TO REGNET, RSSS

Paul Ainsworth, Research Fellow, Centre for Competition and Consumer Policy. Paul was a research and policy analyst on community renewal in the Queensland Department of Housing prior to his arrival in September 2002.

Robyn Bartel, Postdoctoral Fellow in environmental regulation. Joining RegNet in January 2003 after submitting her University of Melbourne PhD in engineering. Robyn is also an ANU university medallist with science and law degrees.

Michael Dowdle, Fellow in comparative constitutionalism. Joining RegNet in January 2003 from Columbia University and the Council for Foreign Relations.

David Levi-Faur, Senior Fellow in the Centre for Competition and Consumer Policy. Joining RegNet in mid-2003 from the Center for Regulation and Competition, University of Manchester.

Monique Marks, Research Fellow in Security 21 will arrive in early 2003 from the University of Natal, South Africa.

Jill Murray, Research Fellow in labour regulation from early 2003 arriving from the University of Melbourne.

Christine Parker, Fellow, Centre for Competition and Consumer Policy, will have a shared appointment with the University of Melbourne during 2003 and will continue to work with the Centre from Melbourne beyond 2003.

Helen Watchirs has had her 1 year postdoc on ADIS audit, supported jointly by the AIDS trust and RegNet, extended to a second year.

Jennifer Wood, Research Fellow in Security 21. Has already been visiting with us for much of 2002 and will arrive in late 2003 from the University of Toronto this time into a salaried RegNet appointment.

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REGNET PROFILES

Andrew Hopkins

Andrew has been working in recent years on disasters such as train crashes, coal mine explosions and fires in petro-chemical plants. He has written about both their causes and the regulatory techniques available for preventing them. His study of the way in which a "culture of denial" contributed to the Moura coal mine explosion has been widely read in the Australian mining industry and has influenced overseas thinking about the causes of accidents.He gave evidence about the organisational and regulatory causes of major accidents at the Royal Commission into the explosion at Esso's gas plant at Longford near Melbourne, and his work on this accident has impacted on the petroleum industry around the world.

He has developed a layered causal model which identifies individual, organisational, regulatory and societal level factors contributing to major accidents. He applied the model in his study of Longford, and more recently he was invited onto an Air Force Board to apply this style of analysis in an inquiry into the exposure of F111 maintenance workers to toxic chemicals.He has written about the regulation of major hazards in various industries and participated in policy development for the regulation of safety in the offshore petroleum industry.

Jenny Job

Responsive regulation and its application to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has been my focus since 1997. I was instrumental at this time in developing the ATO Compliance Model, synthesising John Braithwaite’s work on responsive regulation and Valerie Braithwaite’s work on motivational postures and values. The ATO Compliance Model has now been incorporated into the ATO’s strategic administration plan.

She was part of the team to implement the model in the ATO, assisting with the training of more than 3000 ATO staff in the application of the Compliance Model. In February 2002, AusAID funded my participation in the training of senior East Timorese taxation officers in responsive regulation. The East Timorese officers support the principles of responsive regulation, but with adaptation for cultural difference.

Evaluating the implementation of responsive regulation in the ATO has also been part of my focus. I conducted semi-structured telephone interviews with ATO officers to explore early experiences with responsive regulation. I also worked with Professor Neal Shover, University of Tennessee, to evaluate the trial of responsive regulation in the ATO. With a focus on the Building and Construction industry, we conducted face-to-face interviews with the ATO staff involved in this cash economy project, and with the owners of small firms in the building and construction industry. These evaluations were of major interest at the early stage of implementing the Compliance Model and at a time when there were organisational and cultural changes in the ATO.

Responsive regulation is also a theme in my PhD studies. On the basis of a survey of 837 people from NSW and Victoria, I am exploring the concept of social capital, and in particular trust in institutions, and the influence on law abidingness. The results of this study will provide important directions for regulatory administration work.

Nicola Lacey

Nicola’s contributions to RegNet’s research field fall into two related areas: criminal law/criminal justice scholarship and socio-legal theory. In the former, I have co-written (with Celia Wells) the main socio-legal textbook in the UK: Reconstructing Criminal Law conceptualises criminal law as a field of public regulation which has to be understood in the context both of the special – legal and administrative – institutions through which it is created, interpreted and enforced and of the broad social environment in which it develops and operates. The book has been adopted as the main text in almost all the UK law schools which take a socio-legal approach to the subject. Its distinctive contribution is to enable the study of criminal law from a regulatory perspective while not losing sight of the specificities of legal doctrine. In this book and in a number of articles, I have developed the concept of ‘criminalisation’ as the most useful object of analysis.

My contributions in the field of socio-legal theory have been devoted to analysing – often from a feminist perspective – the regulatory and meta-regulatory potential of legal rules, institutions and practices, and to identifying the links between conceptual analysis on the one hand and socio-historical analysis on the other. My current research on the historical development of conceptions of responsibility in criminal law effectively combines these two sets of interests. In this project, I aim to shed light on the shifting relations between competing (formal and informal, legal and extra-legal) regulatory regimes, and to provide an understanding of the conditions of existence – cultural, political, intellectual and institutional – of particular meta-regulatory regimes.

Nicola Piper

Nicola is a Research Fellow within RegNet in RSSS. Her Ph.D. in Sociology is from the University of Sheffield, U.K, and her previous research appointment was with the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. She has held visiting appointments at Kansai University in Osaka and ADFA in Canberra. Her research interests revolve around issues related to international labour migration, particularly labour/human rights, citizenship and gender. The geographical focus of her work is Europe and Asia. She has written Racism, Nationalism, and Citizenship - Ethnic Minorities in Britain and Germany (Ashgate 1998) and is co-editor of Women and Work in Globalising Asia (Routledge 2002). The project she is currently working on is about transnational advocacy networks on behalf of female labour migrants and human rights in Southeast and East Asia.

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NEW REGNET BUILDING

Finally RegNet will be assembled in one building by February 2004 or perhaps earlier when a new building goes up in the carpark between the Coombs Building and University House. RegNet, the Law Program and the Centre for Tax System Integrity, RSSS will occupy the top two floors of the building (60 offices plus meeting spaces). The bottom floor will be teaching space mainly used by the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. Ideas for naming the building are still being considered and are welcomed – but remember it is a jointly occupied building with Pacific and Asian Studies.

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UPCOMING REGNET EVENTS

Tuesday 4 February, 11:00am – 6:00pm
Wednesday 5 February, 9:00am – 4.30pm

‘The National OHS Regulatory Research Consortium’

Innovations Building
Eggleston Road
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

Thursday 6 February, 9am – 5pm

'Auditing in Perspective’

Innovations Building
Eggleston Roa
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

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