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In 2019, the Kaurna Nation and traditional custodians of the Adelaide plains in South Australia, challenged the City of Holdfast Bay to walk alongside them to create an exhibition exploring the true history of South Australia’s colonisation. This collaboration ultimately became the award-winning exhibition ‘Tiati Wangkanthi Kumangka’ (Truth-Telling Together). This project was envisioned, led, and implemented by the Kaurna Nation at the Bay Discovery Centre in South Australia. Ultimately, ‘Tiati’ became more than just another exhibition. It became a pathway to healing and possibility for both the Kaurna Nation and the City of Holdfast Bay. When considering indigenisation of museum spaces, ‘Tiati’ demonstrates how smaller museums and/or local government can play a pivotal role in reshaping the traditional narrative of colonialism in Australia’s museums, with the voice of First Nations people at the forefront.

This paper aims to carry out a critical analysis of the proposed Australian emissions trading scheme (ETS) as a complex market solution to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs). Specifically it seeks to examine the financial regulatory infrastructure that will more than likely oversee the Australian ETS, the same regulatory infrastructure which failed to prevent the global financial crisis.

A critical examination of the financialisation of the atmosphere that follows the growth of the financialisation of capitalism when economic activity shifted from production and service sectors to finance. Financialisation of capitalism is supported by capitalist regulation influenced by neo‐liberal doctrines of free markets and small government.

Trillions of dollars of taxpayer funds bailed out large financial institutions that nearly collapsed after unregulated trading in complex financial products that were supposed to hedge future risk. Corporate emissions trading will involve similar financial products. The measurement and reporting of actual emissions to support the Australian ETS also creates challenges for the accountancy profession to provide a workable conceptual framework.

If the currently flawed financial infrastructure required for the GHG emissions trading scheme, no amount of taxpayer funded bailouts will reverse the extreme climate change associated with an environmental catastrophe.

The application of financialisation of monopoly capitalism and capitalist regulation theories to the critical analysis of commoditised GHGs traded as financial products in the proposed Australian ETS.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the recent history of proposals to tax resource rents in Australia, from Australia’s Future Tax System Report (the “Henry Tax Review”) through to the proposed Resource Super Profits Tax (“RSPT”) and then the Minerals Resource Rent Tax (“MRRT”). The process of change from Henry to the RSPT to the MRRT can best be understood in the context of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) as a capitalist workers’ party. The author argues that it is this tension in the ALP, the shift in its internal balance further towards capital and the lack of class struggle, that has seen Labor preside over what the father of rent tax in Australia, Ross Garnaut, describes as a “problematic” tax.

Qualitative research using Marxist tools.

The paper argues that the poor health of the MRRT is a consequence of the nature of the Labor Party as a capitalist workers’ party, the shifts in power and influence within its material constitution and in essence the ascendency of capital in the capitalist workers’ party.

A very original approach to understanding the nature of the MRRT in Australia.

Wicked problems require holistic and systemic thinking that accommodates interdisciplinary solutions and cross-sectoral collaborations between private and public sectors. This paper explores how public relations (PR) – as a boundary-spanning function at the nexus of corporate and political discourse – can support societies to tackle wicked problems.

This conceptual paper synthesizes literature on PR with a service ecosystem perspective. The authors use the service ecosystem design framework to structure the PR literature and develop a model of service ecosystem shaping for social change, which highlights the important role that PR can play in shaping processes.

The authors explicate how PR can (1) facilitate value cocreation processes between broad sets of stakeholders that drive positive social change, (2) shape institutional arrangements in general and public discourse in particular, (3) provide a platform for recursive feedback loops of reflexivity and (re)formation that enables discourse to ripple through nested service ecosystems and (4) guide collective shaping efforts by bringing stakeholder concerns and beliefs into the open, which provides a foundation for collective sense-making of wicked problems and their solutions.

This paper explains the complexity of shaping service ecosystems for positive social change. Specifically, it highlights how solving wicked problems and driving social change requires reconfiguration of the institutional arrangements that guide various nested service ecosystems. The authors discuss in detail how PR can contribute to the shaping of service ecosystems for social change and present a future research agenda for both service and PR scholars to consider.

Moral agents have moral choice. This chapter argues that moral choice denies historical inevitability when moral choice is informed by both moral imagination and historical imagination. I explore this by way of one specific historical example which should be used, as the philosopher Bernard Mayo argued, as a moral exemplar. In pursuing my arguments I utilise work by Sir Isaiah Berlin, amongst others. I do though take issue with Berlin, whom I argue has confused not the nature but the role of historical imagination, claiming dominance for it where it cannot dominate. I conclude with historical inevitability being refuted by moral choice, informed by both moral imagination and historical imagination.I argue that the refutation of historical inevitability has implications for Australian businesses in their current dealings with the People’s Republic of China. Australia escaped the Global Financial Crisis because of Chinese purchases of Australian commodities. But Australian business in trading with China is trading with an unjust regime. Hoffman and McNulty (2009) argue that regarding a regime such as China we can ‘learn from our past’. Regarding the past I argue that Australian business executives dealing with China would benefit by studying the historical example of Churchill’s May 1940 decision and should use that as a moral exemplar. Earlier generations of Australian managers contemptuously dismissed Chinese workers. The current generation of Australian managers, who fail to morally acknowledge China’s workers and citizens, risks being equally contemptuous, dismissive and racist.

As a by-product of the production process, emissions can follow output fluctuations. Hence, disregarding the relationship between economic fluctuations and emissions could result in undesirable environmental outcomes. This study aims to investigate the environmental and economic effects of abatement subsidies on overall emissions during business cycles in Australia.

A real business cycle (RBC) model is devised and parameterised in this paper. RBC models have been recently introduced to environmental policy analysis, and this study contributes to the literature by investigating the effects of a potential subsidy policy in an RBC framework. The model is also calibrated and provides solutions for the Australian economy.

The authors find that under a steady-state situation, supporting abatement can result in reducing emissions by 6.45% while it imposes welfare costs to the economy (by 0.61%). Simulation results show that an optimal abatement policy should be pro-cyclical, with the abatement subsidy increasing during expansions and decreasing during recessions. As well, in a subsidy policy setting, emissions would react pro-cyclically, i.e. emissions increase (decrease) when the gross domestic product increases (decreases). The abatement reaction by firms, however, is different, because when a positive productivity shock occurs, firms reduce abatement and allocate resources to production. Nonetheless, as time passes, the increased subsidy provides a strong enough incentive to allocate resources to abatement and, subsequently, abatement increases.

This paper investigates how an emission reduction subsidy should be adapted to macroeconomic fluctuations so that it can limit variations in emissions.

This chapter assesses the impact of socially responsible investing (SRI) in terms of its role in governance. Governance refers to the rules, incentives, institutions and philosophies for coordinating, controlling and supervising behaviour. The SRI sector purports to be a mechanism of market governance, such as through its codes of conduct and targeting of individual companies by engagement or divestment.

This subject-matter of the chapter is evaluated primarily through a conceptual and theoretical argument rather than empirical research.

Social investors’ capacity to ‘govern’ the market is constrained by gaps and deficiencies in the legal frameworks for the financial economy. Fiduciary law controlling institutional investors is the most important element of this governance framework. The SRI movement is starting to broaden its agenda and strategies to include advocacy for regulatory reform. But the SRI industry has devoted attention to its own voluntary codes of conduct, such as the UNPRI, which do not yet provide a sufficiently comprehensive or robust substitute for official regulation.

Paradoxically, whereas SRI once stood for taking action through the financial economy when governments had failed to act, the sector is also somewhat dependent on the state to provide an empowering governance framework. But state regulation itself may be strengthened by partnership with the SRI industry, such as by utilising its codes of conduct to supplement official legal standards.

The chapter deepens insights into the relationship between the SRI sector as a largely voluntary movement and its legal governance through the state or the market.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of the proposed carbon tax on the financial market return of Australian firms. It also considers the differential tax effect on individual firms with different carbon profiles, including factors such as emissions costs, carbon disclosure and climate-change policies.

Utilising the event-study method, the authors examine the market reaction to seven key carbon legislative information events that occurred from February 2011 to November 2011. The sample includes 48 different firms whose emissions-related data are available from Carbon Disclosure Project reports; thus, 336 firm-event observations are used for the cross-sectional analysis.

The paper documents evidence that the proposed tax has an overall negative impact on shareholder wealth as measured by abnormal returns. The negative impact varies across sectors, with the most significant effect found in the materials, industrial and financial sectors. It was also found that a firm’s direct carbon exposure (as measured by Scope 1 emissions) is significantly associated with abnormal returns, whereas the indirect exposure (as measured by Scope 2 emissions) is not, because Scope 2 emissions are not covered by the tax. In addition, the findings suggest that the information content of the events is more notable during the early stages of the development of the carbon tax.

The sample is restricted to the largest firms with relevant carbon profile information. Thus, caution should be exercised when generalising the inferences.

The introduction of the carbon tax was largely unexpected and most firms were unprepared for it; thus, their carbon policy appears inadequate and does not impress investors. An understanding of how the carbon tax affects shareholder value and welfare will encourage management to take proactive actions to mitigate the compliance costs of carbon legislation.

The enactment of the Australian carbon tax perhaps represents one of the biggest social and economic restructuring events in the country’s history. Our results offer initial insight into its impact and suggest that investors would penalise firms with heavy direct operational emissions. In addition, Australian corporate carbon policy seems inadequate, so does not reverse the negative effect of the tax on the value of a firm.