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In Australia there is a strong and widely‐accepted belief that education and politics are, or at least should be, separate. Yet education is a thoroughly political enterprise. For the most part, formal education is under direct government control, and it now constitutes an important area of government responsibility. Consequently, the education system can be thought of constituting a separate sub‐system within the political system. But to understand some or the other inter‐relationships between politics and education it is useful to conceptualize the political and educational systems as separate but interacting systems within the Australian social system. As a field of study and research, the politics of education has been neglected by both educators and political scientists, although very recently this situation has begun to change. A number of important areas for research are outlined and discussed.

The centralization of power in the state and federal legislatures and in their associated professional bureaucracies is a notable feature of both educational and general political decision making in Australia. In this paper “governance” refers to the process of exercising authoritative control, “politics” to public policy making and its resolution. Formal public participation in Australian educational decision making is shown to be minimal, being limited to representation by elected members in the state and federal legislatures. There is no local governmental structure or tax for education. The existing structures and their origins are explained. Two hypotheses derived from the work of Iannaccone are tested. The first states that the longer educational issues remain unsolved in the extra‐legal social networks and lower level legal areas the more likely it is that decisions on these questions will be made by central government departments and agencies. The second states that the more that questions of educational policy are resolved by central departments and agencies the more likely it is that educational policies will become undifferentiated from other kinds of politics or from politics as relating to other policy areas of government. An examination of political developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries supports both hypotheses.

This chapter considers the value of visual analyses for studying social movements through a study of pro-life uses of images of the fetus in the Australian abortion debate. In doing so, it points to important connections between the study of emotions in politics and visual approaches to social movement studies. It also contributes new primary material on the politics of reproduction through its study of the Australian pro-life movement, on which little has been written. Through discursive analysis of visual materials and practices embedded in three case studies, I demonstrate the range of strategies being used; their selection was informed by a wider survey of available records of pro-life uses of images of the fetus over the past four decades. Emotion is a powerful element of politics, and images of the fetus challenge the emotions, and hence the humanity, of the viewer. I identify three major themes represented in pro-life images of the fetus: the wonder of life; the human form and human frailty of the fetus; and the barbarity of modern society. The meanings of these images are built on our parallel understandings of both sight and emotion as immediate and unmediated. Moreover, the ambiguities and dualities of images of the fetus make their themes more, rather than less, persuasive.

This paper aims to obtain the domain of the textual content generated by users of online social network (OSN) platforms. Understanding a users’ domain (s) of interest is a significant step towards addressing their domain-based trustworthiness through an accurate understanding of their content in their OSNs.

This study uses a Twitter mining approach for domain-based classification of users and their textual content. The proposed approach incorporates machine learning modules. The approach comprises two analysis phases: the time-aware semantic analysis of users’ historical content incorporating five commonly used machine learning classifiers. This framework classifies users into two main categories: politics-related and non-politics-related categories. In the second stage, the likelihood predictions obtained in the first phase will be used to predict the domain of future users’ tweets.

Experiments have been conducted to validate the mechanism proposed in the study framework, further supported by the excellent performance of the harnessed evaluation metrics. The experiments conducted verify the applicability of the framework to an effective domain-based classification for Twitter users and their content, as evident in the outstanding results of several performance evaluation metrics.

This study is limited to an on/off domain classification for content of OSNs. Hence, we have selected a politics domain because of Twitter’s popularity as an opulent source of political deliberations. Such data abundance facilitates data aggregation and improves the results of the data analysis. Furthermore, the currently implemented machine learning approaches assume that uncertainty and incompleteness do not affect the accuracy of the Twitter classification. In fact, data uncertainty and incompleteness may exist. In the future, the authors will formulate the data uncertainty and incompleteness into fuzzy numbers which can be used to address imprecise, uncertain and vague data.

This study proposes a practical framework comprising significant implications for a variety of business-related applications, such as the voice of customer/voice of market, recommendation systems, the discovery of domain-based influencers and opinion mining through tracking and simulation. In particular, the factual grasp of the domains of interest extracted at the user level or post level enhances the customer-to-business engagement. This contributes to an accurate analysis of customer reviews and opinions to improve brand loyalty, customer service, etc.

This paper fills a gap in the existing literature by presenting a consolidated framework for Twitter mining that aims to uncover the deficiency of the current state-of-the-art approaches to topic distillation and domain discovery. The overall approach is promising in the fortification of Twitter mining towards a better understanding of users’ domains of interest.

Until the early 1970s the infamous ‘White Australia Policy’ restricted certain types of migrants from entering Australia, particularly those of Asian background, with the goal of creating an ‘Anglo-Celtic’ Australian nation. Post-war mass migration, mostly from Europe, had a significant impact on the ethnic composition of the population. Despite attempts to enforce a mostly ‘British’ migration, the resulting programme would see migrants come from many non-British source countries. This ultimately pressured the government into recognition of cultural diversity and eventually in the early 1970s through the proposition of a multicultural approach. In 1973 multiculturalism was officially introduced slowly becoming a defining national asset. From 1933 to 2001, Italians were the second largest migrant group contributing to Australia’s cultural ‘make-up’, right after the ‘Anglo-Celtic’ segment of the overseas-born population (UK, New Zealand and Ireland). However, the Italian migration of the 1950s and 1960s is a closed chapter of Australian migration history, and Australia now embraces migration from countries where it was initially rejected in the pre-1970s period – Asians, particularly those from China and India. While looking at the specific cases of Italian and Chinese settlement in Australia, this chapter also provides an historical overview of Australian migration policies. We argue that the gradual inclusion of non-British migrants in Australia has been guided since 1901 Federation by a form of ‘economic opportunism’ rather than a real intention to change the ethnic make-up of the population and identity of the nation. Despite forming and maintaining strategic partnerships with Asian countries, migration to Australia is still dominated by the need to preserve a distinctive ‘Anglo-Celtic’ character.

When it comes to deterring and incarcerating people seeking asylum, there is a fusion between racialisation and politicisation. The bedrock is the colonisation of the nation now called Australia, where the dispossession of Indigenous peoples was a national project that later merged into the building of a state that lauded British heritage and the exclusion of migrants through the White Australia policy. This foundation of nationhood continues in a manner that challenges the myth of harmonious multiculturalism by determining who is deemed worthy and who is excluded. The centrepiece of racialised bordering is the immigration detention regime which is increasingly characterised by transporting people to offshore sites. This chapter argues through examples, how people seeking asylum have been racialised, dehumanised and criminalised, particularly through a national security lens.

Public information campaigns (PICs) have increasingly become part of global migration deterrence projects. Australia’s No Way campaign has been widely publicised for its harsh messaging, declaring to would-be asylum seekers that ‘you will not make Australia home’. In this chapter, the author argues that in addition to targeting potential asylum seekers throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the No Way campaign is directed towards multiple audiences, including diaspora communities in Australia, the Australian voting public, and a wider network of anti-immigration political figures. The No Way campaign represented one of the largest and best-funded Australian deterrence campaigns to date, with the distribution of materials ranging from billboards and social media advertisements to street theatre performances and graphic novel storyboards between 2014 and 2016. In the sections that follow, the author situates this argument within the context of the rise of PICs throughout the globe, as well as their use within Australia. Through the lens of this campaign, the author considers the question: for whom is this deterrence messaging? How does it target multiple audiences? The author concludes by considering the future of information campaigns as deterrence projects around the world.

The connections between political parties, the electorate (individual voters) and society at large, that may be achieved through applying marketing is an important area in need of research. Understanding such connections is vitally important for effective and efficient use of marketing in politics and also for improvement in the delivery of the political offering to society. This paper presents the findings of an exploratory research project carried out in Australia on the philosophical basis and operationalisation of marketing in politics. A survey and in‐depth interviews were undertaken to explore issues related to the application of market orientation and its relationship to the marketing concept in political marketing. The results highlight unique dimensions and relationships of marketing in politics.

The purpose of this paper is to seek an understanding of the role of government communication in Australia by examining perspectives on the extent to which public servant communicators persuade or engage the Australian public.

Themes from the public relations literature into the role and function of public relations are used in a qualitative analysis of key government documents and in‐depth interviews conducted with public servants, political staffers, journalists and interest group representatives.

This research found a diversity of views regarding the role communication does and should play within government. Participants without formal experience or education in communication generally viewed the function as one of persuasion and dissemination of information whereas the more experienced argued for more of an engagement with the public. A lack of detailed knowledge and/or use of public relations principles appears to be limiting the understanding of the role and purpose of government communication in Australia.

The research is conducted in an Australian context only and uses a qualitative approach that should not be generalised without further research.

Continued cynicism about the role of public relations in government does little to improve the quality of communication between a government and its public. This paper provides an opportunity for reflection on the purpose of government communication and the role of the public servant.

Previous studies in this area have generally focused on political communication in the sense of partisan or party‐political messages of government. This paper explores the concept from a bureaucratic perspective.

Identity, positioning and possibilities intersect differently for South Asian women in white academia. Within a broader migrant community that defines Australian life, these identities and positioning imply great possibility, but pursuing such pathways within academia is a walk on the last strand of resilience. This paper explores this tension of possibilities and constraints, using hope theory to highlight the cognitive resistance evident in the narratives of three South Asian women in Australian academia.

The authors use collaborative autoethnography to share their narratives of working in Australian universities at three different stages of careers, utilising Snyder's model of hope theory to interrogate their own goal-setting behaviours, pathways and agentic thinking.

The authors propose that hope as a cognitive state informs resistance and enables aspirations to contribute within academia in meaningful ways whilst navigating the terrain of inequitable structures.

The authors' use of hope theory as a lens on the intersectional experiences of career making, building and progression is a new contribution to scholarship on marginalised women in white academe and the ways in which the pathways of resistance are identified.