The neo-liberal revolution and the regional state in Canada and Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the role of regional governments in implementing radical neoliberal reforms during the 1990s. The Harris government in the province of Ontario, Canada, and the Kennett government in the state of Victoria, Australia, are used as case studies. In 1992 the Kennett government was elected to office in a landslide victory, and over the next seven years it cut 10% from government spending, embarked on Australia’s largest privatisation experiment that yielded more than A$30b in proceeds, deregulated the labour and property markets and retrenched over 75,000 public sector workers. In 1995 the Harris government was swept to office with a mandate to implement its manifesto for government: the ‘Common Sense Revolution’. This document, which was described in the National Post as a ‘chamber of commerce wish list’ (May 4, 1994: 15), consisted of a radical reform program of spending cuts, tax cuts and public service retrenchments. Over the next seven years Harris proceeded to implement this agenda, along the way redefining the role of the regional state in Ontario in much the same way as the Kennett government was doing, albeit on a more substantial scale. The question addressed by the paper is this: what are the social and political conditions that have made these sweeping reforms possible? Of particular interest to us is the explanation implicit and sometimes explicit in the existent literature that would have us believe that the rise of neo-liberalism is accompanied by a change in the mode of regulation: people’s values and beliefs shift decisively in ways that render the new regime of accumulation legitimate in their eyes. We ask the question: was this so? We show that in the case of Victoria, at least, it was not. This in turn begs the question of how, then, was the transformation achieved? We suggest that the answer is to be found in a theoretical approach that combines regulation theory with regime theory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".