Overseeing and overlooking: Australian engagement with the Pacific islands 1988-2007
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since Europeans first settled in the region, Australian policy-makers have understood that Australia has security, commercial and humanitarian interests in the Pacific islands.Despite this stable set of interests, Australian engagement has fluctuated greatly; its underlying approach has changed regularly while Australian governments have found it difficult to achieve their objectives.Explanations for this paradox largely rest on the relative weakness of Australian interests and their consequent inability to drive policy in a sustained fashion.However accurate these analyses, their focus on factors that are lacking posits Australian policy as an aberration from policy norms and provides little explanation for the policies that have been adopted in the absence of strong driving interests.This thesis seeks to fill this gap through a historical narrative that traces the formation and implementation of Australian policies to the actions of key policy-makers from 1988 until 2007.Building on theories of foreign policy and public policy-making, it develops a model that links the observed fluctuations in Australian engagement and changes in its approach to the Pacific islands with events in the Pacific islands, the advocacy of 'policy entrepreneurs' and the personality and predilections of the Foreign Minister.Its sources were qualitative and interpretative elite interviews with participants in the making and implementation of Australian policy, newspaper articles, governmental speeches and official reports.The key findings of this thesis are that Australian interests in the Pacific islands have weak institutional representation, rendering Australian engagement particularly dependent on ministerial attention.Policy entrepreneurs have played a critical role in attracting this attention through invoking some crisis in Australia's relationships with the Pacific islands and, crucially, presenting a ready policy response.Between such events, Australian engagement has tended to stagnate as relationships with the Pacific islands are neglected.This pattern has been aggravated, firstly, by the social and political upheaval that has regularly occurred in the Pacific islands, and secondly, by the tendency of Australian officials to incite resistance through insensitive expressions of Australian power.The primary implication of these conclusions is that only strengthened institutional commitment to Australia's relationships with the Pacific islands is likely to moderate their volatility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".