This article continues a longitudinal national study of journalism employment in Australia and contributes to new understandings of journalism employment in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Results suggest a shift in the organisational landscape of the media in Australia, with an expansion of large organisations at the ‘top,’ and a considerable loss of small micro-ventures (largely based online) at the ‘bottom.’ Implications include stronger centralised editorial control at the corporate level, urbanisation and homogenisation of media producers and product, and reduced opportunities for creative entry-level roles.

This article examines the welfare standards that govern the lives of chickens raised for meat in Australia and the United Kingdom. While 'meat chickens' are subject to a wide range of welfare interventions, we focus on the development and implications of the 'private' standards which are the most significant determinants of meat chicken welfare in these jurisdictions: the RSPCA Approved Farming Scheme in Australia and the Red Tractor Chicken Assurance Scheme in the United Kingdom. While the jurisdictions appear to have a similar regime that favours private regulation, differences in the origins and governance of these systems can be identified, offering insights into the use of hybrid regulation in areas associated with the welfare of non-human animals. The similarities and differences in these countries point to the importance of individual relationships, as well as supply chain power in the adoption of private standards as a response to comparatively unstructured community concerns about welfare (Australia) and welfare and food safety (United Kingdom). While hybridity as a form of new public governance can be seen to facilitate innovative and varied responses to state devolution, the article concludes the overarching anthropocentrism of policymakers and the policy sciences explains a closed, incremental, and conservative form of practice in this area. Observations of the wider 'animal turn' in the social sciences are recommended to consider future systems of hybrid regulation that are not centred on anthropocentrism and more fully expand hybridity's participatory promise.Points for practitionersHybrid governance can focus on the use of hybrid organisational design and/or hybrid regulatory practice; each has very different characteristics and their respective use is often a function of local conditions and situations.Hybrid standards-making systems need to be open to public participation in development and implementation (oversight), or risk capture and moral hazard.Public policy is largely predicated on strong anthropocentrism, which can be addressed through the use of critical rather than simple pluralism to expand the number of interests captured in regulatory practices.

This paper examines the phenomenon of Australian 'street libraries'. Enthusiasts have suggested that they contribute to their communal fabric, providing increased sociability and promoting reading and literacy. Street libraries have been associated with 'placemaking' activities. Seen as part of the 'gift' economy, their 'Take a book. Give a Book. Share a Book.' motto promotes their role in recycling. International research has contested some of these claims, with some critics suggesting their role in addressing 'book deserts' is limited, that they represent a highly individualised paternalism by social and economic elites, and they are associated with the neoliberal assault on public libraries. This paper finds mixed evidence in support for the views of advocates and critics. Australian street libraries are skewed towards localities with the highest socio-economic measures of advantage. They are less 'interventions' into the landscape, as associated with private ownership. Street librarians are not, however, disproportionately urban, and their maintainers have greater economic diversity than their 'elite' characterisation would imply. Street libraries can be seen as an example of a gift economy, recycling about $11 million in value in 2021. In addition, some social capital advantages in establishing and maintaining a street library can be identified.

This paper examines the relationships between vegans living in Australia and their tattoos. While tattooing has become an increasingly popular part of mainstream consumer culture, vegans often identify their tattoos in terms of major life events (of which catalysts to become vegan and vegan transition are but one), marks of remembrance or aides-mémoire, and tools to signal to other vegans and begin conversations with non-vegans. Defying simple classification, many of the tattoos sported by vegans are overlaid with multiple meanings. While some aspects of tattoo culture are found within this subset of tattooed people, practice behaviours such as ingredient checking shape tattoo acquisition practices, while the notion of veganism as an ‘final state’ has implications for the way tattoos are commonly seen as marking the ongoing flow of life events. Significantly, a high proportion of vegans’ tattoos express vegan themes implicitly or explicitly, with a significant minority seeing them as part of practices of activism and/or proselytisation. I conclude that this practice is non-trivial and represents an important political practice for many, but certainly not all, of my research participants.

This article critically examines the role new media can play in the political engagement of young people in Australia. Moving away from “deficit” descriptions, which assert low levels of political engagement among young people, it argues two major points. First, that there is a well-established model of contemporary political mobilisation that employs both new media and large data analysis that can and have been effectively applied to young people in electoral and non-electoral contexts. Second, that new media, and particularly social media, are not democratic by nature. Their general use and adoption by young and older people do not necessarily cultivate democratic values. This is primarily due to the type of participation afforded in the emerging “surveillance economy”. The article argues that a focus on scale as drivers of influence, the underlying foundation of their affordances based on algorithms, and the centralised editorial control of these platforms make them highly participative, but unequal sites for political socialisation and practice. Thus, recent examples of youth mobilisation, such as seen in recent climate justice movements, should be seen through the lens of cycles of contestation, rather than as technologically determined.

In 2017 the Australian Government undertook a national survey to determine public support for the legalisation of same-sex marriage. This raised concerns the 'plebiscitary' act may create harms to two groups: LGBTI people and those religious people with strong attachment to heteronormative marriage. Justifying the process, the Government advanced the possibility of civil dialogue generative of understanding. While instances of hate speech in public spaces were reported, this paper examines comparatively private speech during the period. Based on an analysis of posts to relevant Facebook pages, this analysis found opponents to same-sex marriage were more highly mobilised online, and considerable differences in the character of online debate for and against the proposed changes. Importantly, while uncivil and 'hate' speech were part of online conversations, the overall quantum of this uncivil discourse was lower than many feared. Additionally, the process did not generate considerable democratic dialogue around policy alternatives and rationales, particularly among 'Yes' campaign supporters who were more homogenous in their acceptance of dominant campaign framing of the issue than their opponents. Significantly for ongoing public debates about public values like educational access and freedom of expression, opponents to change focused their arguments against same-sex marriage around a subset of unrelated issues: free speech, religious freedoms, and diversity in public schools.

From a media diversity perspective, Australia's standing as an established democracy is not strong.When compared with peer democracies, Australia has the most concentrated media system in the world (Australian Collaboration 2015).The causes of this are various, but include comparatively small market size, 'dumping' of English-language content into the Australian market and lacklustre media policy that has facilitated media conglomerates to consolidate their market share (Winseck 2008).As part of this story, the popularisation of the internet over the last two decades has been an exacerbating factor and corrective: undermining the economic basis of established commercial media and eroding domestic regulatory capacity, while at the same time providing the capacity for the establishment of 'new presses'.This chapter focuses on the conduct and performance of these 'new presses' in the 2016 federal election campaign.While the majority of these new media groups happens to be an internet-based press, the emphasis of this chapter is not on the technological basis of supply per se, but on their relative newness into the Australia marketplace.This breaks with a traditional tendency to see 'new media' as internet-based media, an increasingly meaningless classification tool given the increasing incorporation of new technology into the established media, as discussed by Andrea Carson and Brian McNair (Chapter 19, this volume).

After six weeks of a faux campaign followed by eight weeks of official and vigorous campaigning, the night of Saturday 2 July 2016 proved an anticlimax for election observers, particularly those expecting a clear result.Australia's seventh double-dissolution election did not deliver the political 'cut-through' intended by the Constitutional framers-inspiring the title of this volume: Double Disillusion.Making his election-night speech to the party faithful assembled at the Wentworth Hotel in Sydney, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull did not declare victory.Rather, he cautiously relayed the news that: based on the advice I have from the party

Acceptance of the concept of replacement, refinement, and reduction (the 3Rs) and the need for their implementation is widespread in the research community, and is also backed by local governance requirements in many key jurisdictions. Yet concerns about underutilization of these concepts and practices remain. From a survey of animal welfare officers (AWOs) in Australia, the attitudes to, and the adoption of, 3Rs in Australian public universities is explored. The survey finds that Australian AWOs have considerable concerns about 3R uptake, with 44% agreeing that '3R possibilities often remain unused'. At the same time, these officers see access to relevant information, and the implementation of the 3Rs, as comparatively easy. Thus, a problem of under-implementation appears to exist. A number of explanations for this are put forward. AWOs are comparatively junior professional staff in the Australian university system, constrained from going beyond basic regulative functions and to the training and promotion of the 3Rs. When compared with their international counterparts, Australian AWOs spend less time providing information and advice on the 3Rs to researchers working in their institutions. Significantly, while AWOs tend to see themselves as being well supported institutionally, they have comparatively poor relationships with active researchers who are using animal models. The implications of this are examined, with recommendations for research institutions, as well as for further research.

This item is an extract from the book 'Animal Welfare in Australia: Politics and Policy', published in 2016 by Sydney University Press.The book may be purchased from Sydney University Press at the following link: http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/sup/animalwelfareinaus.

The term 'social media' is generally used to describe services like Twitter, Facebook and blogs (though see Kaplan and Haenlein 2010 for a more complex definition).

Information and communications technologies are increasingly important in the Australian political landscape. From the adoption of new forms of electoral campaigning to the use of networking technology to organise social movements, media technology has the potential to radically change the way politics is conducted and experienced in this country.

Occupy is a formative social movement that has gained considerable attention in Europe and North America. Beginning circa early May 2011 in Spain ('the Indignants' or '15-M' movement) and growing in response to the domestic effects of the economic crisis sweeping through parts of Europe (Der Spiegel International, 2011), the Movement's ideas and concerns were picked up in the United States, initially via the activist magazine Adbusters (Schwartz 2012) under the banner 'Occupy Wall Street' in mid-September. Under the construction of 'Occupy [location]', the social movement spread throughout North America and globally. The style of the Movement has tended to focus on the establishment, where possible, of permanent encampments to act as a base of operations, focus of solidarity and media (making and reporting). The emphasis on the occupation of public space has been attributed to inspiration from the 'Arab Spring' uprisings in the Middle-East (Hall, 2011), as well as reflecting concerns about civic participation and access to sites for democratic expression.