Australia's rivers are among the most variable in the world and this has been a major challenge in catchments such as the Murray–Darling Basin where management has focused on increasing agricultura...

Australia Demonstrates the Planet's Future: Water and Climate in the Murray-Darling Basin

The Australian offshore constitutional settlement

Extreme climate events and related disasters are increasing both in frequency and intensity. Resulting impacts materialize in the form of devastating bushfires, flooding, hurricanes, and cyclones and bring with them the tragic loss of life and substantial loss and damage to phenomena of value. Disaster management plays a central role in attempting to minimize and manage these impacts, and many government institutions posit that shared responsibility with citizens is the most effective approach to achieve this. However, some scholarship contends that shared approaches preference responsibility too far towards citizens and too far away from government institutions and are ineffective in lessening and managing such impacts. Here, we analyze governmental inquiries and actions undertaken regarding three past catastrophic disasters—2005 Hurricane Katrina (USA), the 2009 Victorian Bushfires (Australia), and the 2011 Queensland Floods (Australia). We assess, across these inquiries, 'what went wrong', 'what was working', and 'what needs fixing' with shared responsibility in disaster management. Our results indicate pervasive ineffectiveness in leadership, governance, trust, and resilience. We discuss how neoliberal influence contributes towards this ineffectiveness and suggest how this influence can be actively contested. We conclude by advocating for a reinstated social contract that inserts citizen rights and justice into disaster management policy making concomitant with the redistribution of public and third sector resources administered through inclusive governance frameworks. Such a social contract affords citizens greater opportunity to exercise agency whilst maximizing institutional support before, during, and after a disaster to provide greater protection and reduce harm.

Disaster management and the need for a reinstated social contract of shared responsibility

Historically the Victorian national park system developed sporadically between 1898 and 1970. Since then the area of national parks has increased well over tenfold through a combination of strong community support and the operation of the Land Conservation Council. This article examines Victoria's national park system in detail and describes the legislation, administration and resourcing of the Victorian park system over the period 1970–1993 in particular. The discussion centres on the question of Victoria's ability to make the transition from the phase of acquisition of substantial areas to the national park estate to the phase of high quality management of those areas. Such a transition would have to be against the background of the parlous state of the Victorian economy, the pressures of increased tourism and the need to rejuvenate an administrative organisation which has been subject to almost constant change over the last decade. The article concludes by considering what lessons the Victorian experie...

Victoria's National Park System: Can the Transition from Quantity of Parks to Quality of Management be Successful?

SUMMARY Within the Murray‐Darling Basin lie Australia's most important water and land resources as well as some of the country's most serious resource management problems. This paper summarises the importance of the resource‐based industries, especially agriculture. The major agricultural and water resource problems are outlined, with most attention being paid to salinity. Critical to the problems and their solution are the institutional arrangements for the management of this large interstate river basin. The River Murray Waters Agreement, dating from 1914, has had limited success in tackling the basin's problems, because of its limited geographical and functional scope, especially in the area of water quality. The growing severity of the latter problems, especially salinity, resulted in the 1987 signing of the Murray‐Darling Basin Agreement to promote and coordinate the management of the basin's water, land and environmental resources. As it is concerned with the basin as a whole, its success is depende...

Geoffrey Sawer

Papers

The Australian Constitution