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Policy-at-Risk: The Effects of Financial Conditions on the Conduct of Monetary Policy in Australia
No full textThe global financial crisis (GFC) of the late 2000s marked an important event in terms of changing attitudes towards prudential and financial regulation. However, it also demonstrated the close connectivity between financial conditions and macroeconomic performance. It is therefore important to understand the influence of changing financial conditions on the conduct of monetary policy by central banks, particularly how central banks respond to these changes. This thesis constructs a financial conditions index (FCI) for Australia to represent the state of financial conditions between 1976 and 2023. I use a two-stage regression model as part of a novel policy-at-risk (PaR) model to assess the effects of financial conditions on monetary policy first at the mean level, and secondly at different quantiles along the distribution of interest rate changes. I also assess the uncertainty associated with monetary policy over time by plotting the conditional distribution of the overnight cash rate (OCR) together with its fitted quantiles. The findings reveal that when the OCR is low relative to systematic policy, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is less responsive to changes in financial conditions, resulting in smaller interest rate cuts. Conversely, the RBA reacts more strongly to financial conditions when the OCR is relatively high
Responding to an Epochal Climate Crisis: Introducing a framework of Strategic Socio-Ecological Relational analysis (SSER) to position planetary, capital and hegemonic relations through state ensembles in Australia
No full textHistorical and contemporary strategic projects and capital accumulation regimes have eroded critical planetary processes, escalating the risk of systemic tipping points and frequent global crises. This dissertation proposes that by understanding the varying state ensembles as the shifting, contested peaks of spatially-specific socio-ecological relations, there lies an opportunity to utilise a Strategic Socio-Ecological Relational (SSER) framework. As a proposed critical approach, the SSER framework is grounded in Jason Moore's World-Ecology approach and, in particular, the concept of the oikeios, the relational web of life on Earth. This work identifies an opportunity to augment Moore’s approach with Bob Jessop’s approach to the state, the Strategic-Relational Approach, to further enhance the complexity and scope of critical relational assessments.
Through the examination of unique socio-ecological relations, accumulation regimes and hegemonic projects, the SSER framework shows that Australia’s key strategic axes are highly capitalised and globally significant, from the North-West shelf through to the Murray-Darling Water Basin. The SSER assessment highlights a variety of specific points of exhaustion across Australia’s neoliberal, market-dominated critical axes of water, energy and terrestrial biocarbon. This work finds that the risk of exhaustion is amplified by state projects that ostensibly intend to ‘restore nature’ but in fact continue the capitalisation of recovery mechanisms, violent abstraction of natures, and the exhaustion of key planetary processes through the state ensemble. The adoption of this interdisciplinary approach to the assessment of socio-ecological relational bundles is vital in successfully reorienting a coherent socio-ecological response to the challenges of impending epochal collapse
Connected Learning at Scale: Strategic Project Evaluation Report
No full textThe Connected Learning at Scale: Strategic Project Evaluation Report provides a summary of the CLaS project, explains the co-design process used, summarises the project outcomes, notes the global outreach of the project, highlights core research output, and presents the future for the important lessons learned
Religious Representations in the Francophone Iconographic Satire Landscape: The Analysis of Charlie Hebdo’s Caricatural Bande Dessinée, La Vie de Mahomet (2013)
No full textHow does La Vie de Mahomet (Charlie Hebdo)'s novel strategy - which combines a BD form and substantive analytical tools in peritext - contribute to asserting authorial control over the caricatural representation of Islam in secular French culture and, ultimately, to the renewal of the caricatural genre
Multiple covalent forms of Antithrombin: implications in thrombosis
No full textAntithrombin is a key anticoagulant protein that regulates the proteolytic activity of several procoagulant proteases, and its deficiency is associated with pathological thrombosis. Our study of coagulation proteins has revealed that they are often constitutively produced as multiple partially disulphide-bonded states that can be important for protein function. Antithrombin contains three disulphide bonds and their state and function in the mature protein was investigated. Disulphide-bonded states of plasma antithrombin from healthy human donors were quantified using differential cysteine alkylation and mass spectrometry. The C21-C95, C247-C430, and C8-C128 disulphide bonds are unformed in ~1 in 3, ~1 in 5, and ~1 in 10 antithrombin molecules, respectively. Heparin selectively binds a subset of antithrombin molecules with significantly more unformed disulphides and greater conformational flexibility measured by intrinsic protein fluorescence. Force spectroscopy studies revealed enhanced heparin-antithrombin bond lifetimes for the heparin-selected subset. The functions of the most prevalent antithrombin states, containing an unpaired C21-C95 or C247-C430 disulphide bond, were investigated by replacing both cysteines of the disulphide with alanine or valine. Ablation of the bonds affected uncatalysed and heparin-catalysed inhibition of factor Xa and thrombin, rate of conversion to the latent antithrombin state, structural flexibility, hydrodynamic radius and molecular dynamics. These findings indicate that antithrombin circulates in different disulphide-bonded states and a subset of molecules with more unformed disulphides, greater conformational flexibility, and subtly different functional properties selectively binds to heparin
Managing Paradoxical Trade-Offs: Sustainability and Diversification Strategies of Supply Managers
No full textThis paper investigates how practicing supply managers evaluate the paradoxical trade-offs of environmental and social sustainability relative to cost and supply diversification. Although sustainable business practices are important, firms often struggle to translate these goals into actions. As sourcing decisions are key to sustainable supply chains, we investigate how managers make trade-offs in supplier selection. We completed a discrete choice experiment with 217 experienced professionals, with realistic levels based on observed supplier evaluations. We show how these practicing supply managers value and trade-off between location diversification, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability. We found that managers resisted selecting new suppliers with worse sustainability profiles and were willing to incur slightly higher costs for suppliers with better environmental and social performance. These results were stronger for managers at lower levels of the firm. Managers also valued environmental performance more than social performance, and lower-level managers were more likely to view these as substitutes. Specific to risk management, supply managers were willing to pay more for increased geographic diversification of the suppliers, even if adding diversification resulted in poorer environmental performance. However, they were reluctant to add new suppliers within the same country unless doing so also improved environmental performance. Understanding how practicing supply chain professionals value and trade-off competing priorities when selecting suppliers can help companies manage risk and improve environmental and social sustainability
Power, Control and Resistance in the Labour Process of School Leaders: The Case of the NSW Public Education System
No full text‘Power, Control and Resistance in the Labour Process of School Leaders: The Case of the
New South Wales Education System’ is an employment relations thesis that combines
an understanding of neoliberal public policy with labour process theory to examine the
work of public school leaders. Since 2011, the New South Wales public education
system has undergone extensive state-driven change, with ‘new public management’
reform aiming to introduce claimed private-sector efficiencies through the devolution of
managerial responsibilities to the local level of the school. Initial reforms failed to
improve educational outcomes, and led to system-wide intensification of workloads for
staff in schools. As a corrective response, the ‘School Success Model’ was implemented
in 2020: a second suite of reforms that claimed to reintroduce centralised support while
emphasising shared, rather than local, responsibility.
This research investigates the impact of the School Success Model on school leaders’
work, recognising their position at the nexus of this public policy and its workplace
enactment. It adopts a qualitative methodology, including semi-structured interviews
with principals, deputy principals, and key stakeholders in public education, to first
understand the key challenges in their work during this policy period. It then conducts a
labour process analysis of work under new public management to investigate the
outcomes of the reform, and identify control mechanisms in the work of school leaders.
Further, articulating the constant tensions present in their work, it presents evidence of
resistance to these control mechanisms. Its findings contribute to our theoretical
understanding of the labour process of school leaders as ‘pseudo-managers’ in the
public sector for whom work is increasingly controlled, despite policy rhetoric around
either the expansion of local autonomy or increases in centralised system support
Transforming Professional Practice: Learning From Country
No full textFor some time, the Learning from Country (LFC) framework has been successfully implemented in teacher education at the University of Sydney. Evidence from a longitudinal study (2018-2022) on the transformative impact of LFC on preservice teachers in developing culturally responsive teaching practices is contained in various academic and non-academic reports (cf. Burgess et al., 2022a,2022b; Coombes et al, 2024; Thorpe et al. 2021; Thorpe et al, 2024 , and Appendix AARE Blogpost, Centre for Professional Learning).
This project allowed an interdisciplinary team from the Sydney School of Education and Social Work (SSESW), Susan Wakil School of Nursing and Midwifery (Sydney Nursing School [SNS]), and the Sydney Business School to apply the framework within nursing degrees to see if it was transferable to other professional education and training contexts. This is a report into the findings of that project
Does the composition of credit matter for Australian monetary policy transmission?
No full textThe composition of credit is rarely discussed when quantifying the role of credit in Australian monetary policy transmission. As the share of household and business credit has changed, it is important to understand whether the composition will matter for monetary policy transmission. I use a SVAR model to quantify the sensitivity of household and business credit to monetary policy finding relatively symmetric responses for all components. However, the SVAR model fails to account for the changing share of household and business credit. Implementing a DSGE model with credit, I construct three compositions representative of Australia’s credit composition since 1992. Household credit is shown to be more sensitive to a tightening of monetary policy as the share of household credit increases, as has occurred in Australia. Meanwhile, a business-dominant composition will propagate monetary policy shocks to investment and output. Furthermore, a shock to borrowing constraints implies the gradual change in credit composition will impact Australia’s financial stability more broadly as business credit has the strongest relationship with macroeconomic variables. As the share of business credit has gradually declined, the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission through credit to key macroeconomic variables may have decreased