Books
Browse or search ANU Press' range of books or find out more about the publications' authors and co-publishers. Download the book for free or buy a print-on-demand copy.
Displaying results 481 to 490 of 796.
Ted Freeman and the Battle for the Injured Brain »
A case history of professional prejudice
Authored by: Peter McCullagh
Publication date: August 2013
This book recounts some experiences of young Australians with catastrophic brain injuries, their families and the medical system which they encountered. Whilst most of the events described occurred two to three decades ago they raise questions relevant to contemporary medical practice.
The patients whose stories are told were deemed to be ‘unsuitable for rehabilitation’ and their early placement in nursing homes was recommended. In 2013, it is time to acknowledge that the adage of ‘one size fits all’ has no place in rehabilitation in response to severe brain injury. Domiciliary rehabilitation, when practicable, may be optimal with the alternative of slow stream rehabilitation designed to facilitate re-entry into the community.
Patients’ families were impelled to undertake heroic carers’ commitments as a reaction to nihilistic medical prognoses. It is time for the Australian health care system to acknowledge those commitments, and the budgetary burden which they lift from the system by providing family members with support to retrieve career opportunities, most notably in education and employment, which have been foregone in caring.
Medical attendants repeatedly issued negative prognoses which were often confounded by the patient’s long term progress. Hopefully, those undertaking the acute care of young people with severe brain injury will strive to acquire an open mind and recognise that a prognosis based on a snapshot observation of the patient, without any longer term contact provides a flawed basis for a prognosis. The story of these patients and of Dr Ted Freeman has wider implications.
China: A New Model for Growth and Development »
Edited by: Ross Garnaut, Cai Fang, Ligang Song
Publication date: July 2013
The Chinese economy is undergoing profound change in policy and structure. The change is necessary to increase the value of growth to the Chinese community, and to sustain growth into the future. The changes are so comprehensive and profound that they represent a new model of Chinese economic growth. This book describes the replacement of an old uninhibited investment expansion model of growth, by transition to modern economic growth and provides insights into recent changes and where they are likely to lead. These include requirements for building the new institutions including its public finances for future growth, adjustments in its savings, industry and agriculture, changes in its demographic structure, business environment, and pattern of rural-urban migration, prospects for ‘green growth’, its energy policy trilemma and the climate change mitigation strategy, and changes for China’s interaction with the international economy through its overseas investment and trade in high tech products. China’s adoption of a new model of economic growth is of immense importance to people in China and everywhere. This book is an early attempt to take a close look at many of the features of the new model.
China: A New Model for Growth and Development (Chinese version) »
中国长期增长与发展的新战略: 责任与启示
Authored by: Ross Garnaut, 蔡 昉 宋立刚
Publication date: July 2013
中国经济正经历着政策和结构方面的深刻变革. 这种变革对于提高中国 社会的增长绩效、 保持未来中国经济的发展潜力都很有必要. 成功的经济发展改变了中国传统的增长模式, 也给经济发展带来了压力, 而这种压力正是变革的内驱力之一. 近年来, 劳动力短缺及真实工资迅速上涨给中国经济的传统模式带来了巨大挑战, 使得资源和收入分配、自然环境、经济增长率、储蓄率、 投资率与国际资本流动等都有所变化. 原有的增长模式在过去取得了巨大的成功, 也引发了上文所述的种种变化, 而国家政策层面上的改革亦会改善现状, 使中国的收人分配体系更加公平, 国内环境和国际环境更加有利于中国经济的发展.
Chinese version of this book is available from this Social Science and Academic Press.
Discretion and Public Benefit in a Regulatory Agency »
The Australian Authorisation Process
Authored by: Vijaya Nagarajan
Publication date: July 2013
This book explores the manner in which a variety of public benefits such as environmental protection and consumer safety have been accommodated through the authorisation process within competition law and policy in Australia. While the regulator’s use of its discretion can be explained as a triumph of practice over theory, this book explores the potential for competition principles to be imbued by the wider discourses of democratic participation and human rights. In doing so it makes a significant contribution to the Australian competition policy as well as reconceptualising the way in which discretion is used by regulators.
… a very important and creative contribution to the literatures on both business regulation in general and Australian competition and consumer protection law in particular. It pays special attention to an everyday regulatory function that is often ignored in scholarship. And it is very important in challenging—on both empirical and normative policy oriented grounds—a narrowly economic approach to competition law, and proposing an alternative understanding and practice for the public benefit test in ACCC authorisations.
— Professor Christine Parker
The data Vij Nagarajan has analysed is quite unique in its focus. It is a kind of data and analysis that has not been completed before in the international literature. It is well written, theoretically sophisticated and incisive in its policy analysis.
— John Braithwaite
Politics of preferential development »
Trans-global study of affirmative action and ethnic conflict in Fiji, Malaysia and South Africa
Authored by: Steven Ratuva
Publication date: July 2013
The book is a critical examination of affirmative action, a form of preferential development often used to address the situation of disadvantaged groups. It uses a trans-global approach, as opposed to the comparative approach, to examine the relationship between affirmative action, ethnic conflict and the role of the state in Fiji, Malaysia and South Africa. While affirmative action has noble goals, there are often intervening political and ideological factors in the form of ethno-nationalism and elite interests, amongst others, which potentially undermine fair distribution of affirmative action resources. The book examines the affirmative action philosophies and programs of the three countries and raises pertinent questions about whether affirmative action has led to equality, social justice, harmony and political stability and explores future possibilities.
Steven Ratuva provides a brilliant critical study, not just of affirmative action policy and practice in three very different postcolonial contexts, but of the very complex matters of principle, justification and ideology that are involved more generally. It is an invaluable contribution to the literature on this important topic.
— Dr Stephanie Lawson, Professor of Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University.
Scholarly and provocative, Steven Ratuva’s Politics of Preferential Development is an original and insightful comparative contribution to the growing literature on affirmative action around the world.
— Dr Ralph Premdas, Professor of Public Policy, University of West Indies; Former Professor, University of California Berkeley and University of Toronto.
Macassan History and Heritage »
Journeys, Encounters and Influences
Edited by: Marshall Clark, Sally K. May
Publication date: June 2013
This book presents inter-disciplinary perspectives on the maritime journeys of the Macassan trepangers who sailed in fleets of wooden sailing vessels known as praus from the port city of Makassar in southern Sulawesi to the northern Australian coastline. These voyages date back to at least the 1700s and there is new evidence to suggest that the Macassan praus were visiting northern Australia even earlier. This book examines the Macassan journeys to and from Australia, their encounters with Indigenous communities in the north, as well as the ongoing social and cultural impact of these connections, both in Indonesia and Australia.
Asia-Pacific Security »
Policy Challenges
Edited by: David W. Lovell
Publication date: May 2013
Since September 11, 2001, our newspapers have been filled with the ‘war on terror’; our governments have mobilised their resources for ‘homeland security’; and people everywhere are braced for more terrorist attacks.
Yet while the new threat is genuine, we must not lose sight of the continuing security concerns in the Asia-Pacific. Tensions persist on the Korean peninsula, in the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea, and in Kashmir. The region is well supplied with weapons of mass destruction and may face an arms race, and there are a range of pressing human security issues. Likewise, the strategic realities of the region remain linked with US power, and with the emergence of China as a key regional player.
The book examines the developing strategic relationships in the region, and clarifies the dilemmas for Australian policy-makers as they try to balance genuine engagement with the region against a long-standing and valued alliance with the United States.
Emerging from discussions between the Shanghai Institute for International Studies and the University of New South Wales at ADFA, Asia-Pacific Security has a particular relevance for foreign-policy professionals and scholars of the region.
Printed copies of this book may be ordered from ISEAS publishing.
France in the South Pacific »
Power and Politics
Authored by: Denise Fisher
Publication date: May 2013
France is a Pacific power, with three territories, a military presence, and extensive investments. Once seen by many as a colonial interloper in the South Pacific, by the early 2000s, after it ended nuclear testing in French Polynesia and negotiated transitional Accords responding to independence demands in New Caledonia, France seems to have become generally accepted as a regional partner, even if its efforts concentrate on its own territories rather than the independent island states.
But France’s future in the region has yet to be secured. By 2014 it is to have handed over a set of agreed autonomies to the New Caledonian government, before an independence referendum process begins. Past experience suggests that a final resolution of the status of New Caledonia will be divisive and could lead once again to violent confrontations. In French Polynesia, calls continue for independence and for treatment under UN decolonisation procedures, which France opposes. Other island leaders are watching, so far putting faith in the Noumea Accord, but wary of the final stages. The issues and possible solutions are more complex than the French Pacific island population of 515,000 would suggest.
Combining historical background with political and economic analysis, this comprehensive study offers vital insight into the intricate history – and problematic future – of several of Australia’s key neighbours in the Pacific and to the priorities and options of the European country that still rules them. It is aimed at policy-makers, scholars, journalists, businesspeople, and others who want to familiarise themselves with the issues as France’s role in the region is redefined in the years to come.
A Good Life »
Human rights and encounters with modernity
Authored by: Mary Edmunds
Publication date: May 2013
This book is a story. It’s a story about ordinary people in very different parts of the world dealing with rapid change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It’s about times of turbulent and violent social upheaval and rupture with the past. It’s about modern times. It’s also about being human; what it is to be human in a modernising and globalising world; how, in responding to the circumstances of their times, different groups define, redefine, and attempt to put into practice their understandings of the good and of what constitutes a good life. And it’s about how human rights have come to be not abstract universal principles but a practical source of consciousness and practice for real people.
Drawing on the author’s experience as an anthropologist, the book examines different groups over the last three decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first: Thai factory workers over a period of two coups in the 1970s; Spanish nuns in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and the end of the Franco dictatorship; Aboriginal people in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia dealing with the impact of late colonialism and moves towards self-determination, from the 1980s to the present. Each of these groups has its own stories, illuminating ways in which, despite the assault of modernisation on deeply held traditional beliefs and practices, particular cultural understandings and practices continue to shape people’s responses to their novel circumstances. The very diversity of the studies presented in the book raises some of the most compelling moral and social questions of our time and invites the reader, both academic and lay, to focus on what it is that makes us human; whether there are human universals as well as cultural particularities; whether human rights provide universal norms and practices; what unites as well as divides us; and where morality, and understandings of a good life, can be sourced in a secular modern world.
“This is a book about hope, the hope that we have ways to live together in a rapidly changing world which will enable us to ‘live a good life in the modern world.’”
Hon. Fred Chaney AO.
Japan's Failed Revolution »
Koizumi and the Politics of Economic Reform
Authored by: Aurelia George Mulgan
Publication date: May 2013
Japan’s Failed Revolution: Koizumi and the Politics of Economic Reform asks why, despite all the high expectations, the Japanese public’s desire for economic reform, and leadership of a majority coalition in a parliamentary democracy, the reformer Prime Minister Koizumi has not achieved the economic reforms expected of him since he surprisingly attained power over a year ago. To unravel this ‘puzzle’, Aurelia George Mulgan eschews the simplicities of both cultural and rational choice explanations and systematically tests the propositions in the comparative literature on ‘failed reform’. The result is one of the best books ever written about contemporary Japanese politics. It explains how, despite British-style parliamentary institutions, Japan’s very ‘un-Westminster’ traditional policymaking process involving the ruling party and the bureaucracy’s structure and linkage has stymied and will probably continue to stymie even a sincere and active Prime Minister’s best reform intentions. This book should be read by all political scientists, journalists, economists, and students interested in contemporary Japan.
Ellis S. Krauss
Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies
University of California, San Diego.
The author takes a scalpel to dissect Japan’s dysfunctional political system. She shows with wonderful clarity and depth of knowledge why the Koizumi reforms are not succeeding, and why revolutionary political change is needed as a precondition for economic recovery. The book should be required reading for anyone involved with contemporary Japan.
J.A.A. Stockwin
University of Oxford.