'A toaster with pictures' was the characterisation of television by the former chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission and advocate of broadcasting deregulation, Mark Fowler. It encapsulates the view of the neo-liberal reformers who set about to deregulate broadcasting as part of the wide-ranging economic attack on the structures of state regulation. Broadcasting was a consumer industry like any other. It conformed to the rules of economic behaviour and performed at its optimum in an environment of a free market. This thesis traces the deregulation of broadcasting in New Zealand from its theoretical origins, to its adoption by policy advisors of the New Zealand Treasury, and its legislative enactment by the Government in the late l980s and early 1990s. But the account also traverses wider than those narrow boundaries. It is argued that in order to understand why this country undertook such a thoroughgoing reform of the broadcasting sector it is necessary to look at its history and account for the apparent wholesale rejection of the previous structures which were portrayed as regulated public service broadcasting. It is also essential to the story of broadcasting deregulation in New Zealand to determine why this country was a pathfinder of reform. The essential conditions which enabled the speedy implementation of the policy whilst in other nations the reform process in broadcasting was stalled, only partially implemented, or rejected. The comparative overview also brings into focus the arguments of the opponents of deregulating this ‘particular' or 'peculiar' industry with its social and cultural role in society. As New Zealand was the first nation deliberately to enact the deregulation of broadcasting, the final sections of the thesis look at the 'model' and assess its impact. The reforms have led to a new marketplace of broadcasting in which the audience is viewed as consumers rather than citizens. The dismantling of the social contract in broadcasting between the state and citizens and its replacement by supposedly individual contracts between broadcasters and consumers is, it is suggested, dysfunctional for democratic civil society.

In 1996, at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was opened for signature. Within one week, seventy states, including all five nuclear-weapon states, signed the Treaty. This brought to an end fifty years of both nuclear tests and nuclear test-ban negotiations. For many states, the achievement of the CTBT was a major success for nuclear arms control. New Zealand played an important role in the early stages of the CTBT negotiation. Every year from 1972, New Zealand and Australia tabled a resolution in the General Assembly calling for a CTBT. After two decades of diplomacy, the resolution was adopted by consensus in 1993, allowing negotiation for a CTBT to take place in the Conference on Disarmament. Substantive negotiation for a CTBT began in 1993, but test-ban negotiations had been taking place almost since the start of nuclear testing in 1945. Like many other nuclear arms control issues, the negotiations had been dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union. Engaged in their own nuclear arms race, the two superpowers pursued their own bilateral nuclear arms control negotiations to manage their strategic relationship. Until the CTBT negotiation, multilateral nuclear arms control was mostly limited to the Treaty for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The NPT reflected the desire of many non-nuclear states to become involved in nuclear arms control and use multilateral agreements to place obligations on the nuclear-weapon states. While both bilateral and multilateral nuclear arms control often languished due to disagreements, multilateral nuclear arms control negotiation has also dealt with the complexity of reconciling the perspectives of many states. This complexity has made the use of negotiation theories difficult, although if used pragmatically, theory can be a useful tool for the study of negotiation events. Through the test-ban resolution, New Zealand was able to contribute to the process of reaching consensus by acting as a facilitator. New Zealand is a good example of how a small non-nuclear state can make a useful contribution in multilateral nuclear arms control negotiation, typically dominated by large nuclear-weapon states, and still advance its national interests.

Ideally, a citizen is an individual who is a formal member of a self-governing political community, with individual rights and freedoms that are equal to those of other citizens, and which are protected by law. This thesis investigates how closely the citizenship status of non-Maori ethnic minorities in New Zealand approximated this ideal during the 1990s. Its particular focus is on how the neo-liberal ideology of National and Coalition Governments between 1990 and 1999, and those Governments' understandings of the nature and political significance of ethnicity, affected the ability of those belonging to non-Maori ethnic minority groups to be full and equal members of the New Zealand political community, with an equal capacity for self-governance at the individual level and as members of the political community. The thesis takes the form of a survey of public policy and law over a period of nine years. Five broad areas or aspects of public policy are examined: the collection and dissemination of official 'ethnic' statistics; immigration and citizenship policy; civil rights provided for in domestic and international law; mechanisms for ensuring access to political decision-making; and social policy. The question asked in the thesis is whether the policies developed and administered in each of these areas during the 1990s enriched or detracted from the citizenship status of non-Maori ethnic minorities.

There is a strain of social criticism, dating back to the fifties and sixties, which alleged that New Zealand was about to become a society more clearly divided by lines related to "class". New Zealand was presented as a society in which a natural egalitarianism of social habits and attitudes had flourished. The critical voices of this earlier period feared that as New Zealand's economy evolved further, so would the degree of social demarcation within society. They expected that these changes would show up most rapidly, and with deeper effects, in the northernmost part of New Zealand, particularly in Auckland. There the postwar period's industrial development and population growth was greatest. In the suburbs of the north, middle class beliefs and life styles would develop. Suburban life, in areas of new housing containing those who most notably benefited from these changes, would provide mutual reinforcements for the evolution of a much more consciously middle class way of life. Many of the implications of this social criticism are explored in this thesis by means of a questionnaire professionally administered to a sample of 312 respondents in three Auckland electorates. East Coast Bays was chosen as an example of a burgeoning middle class suburb, Te Atatu as a newer area of working class settlement, and Birkenhead as a bridge between the two of them, socially and politically. The survey was administered shortly before the 1978 general election. A variety of facts about, and attitudes to, housing, employment, life styles, suburban locations and indistrialisation are explored. These are normally related back to the basic dependent variables of voting choice, electorate, the propensity to think in class terms, and subjective class identification. The overwhelming pressure of the evidence is that of continuity with the egalitarian past. The chief hypothesis tested is that "following on the most rapid processes of postwar industrialisation in New Zealand, new suburban contexts have evolved in Auckland in which the middle class beneficiaries of Auckland's growth are reinforced in attitudes that reject egalitarianism, accept differential rewards and life styles, and are associated with distinctive political and social attitudes". On the evidence presented in this study it must be rejected.

In 1996, at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was opened for signature. Within one week, seventy states, including all five nuclear-weapon states, signed the Treaty. This brought to an end fifty years of both nuclear tests and nuclear test-ban negotiations. For many states, the achievement of the CTBT was a major success for nuclear arms control. New Zealand played an important role in the early stages of the CTBT negotiation. Every year from 1972, New Zealand and Australia tabled a resolution in the General Assembly calling for a CTBT. After two decades of diplomacy, the resolution was adopted by consensus in 1993, allowing negotiation for a CTBT to take place in the Conference on Disarmament. Substantive negotiation for a CTBT began in 1993, but test-ban negotiations had been taking place almost since the start of nuclear testing in 1945. Like many other nuclear arms control issues, the negotiations had been dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union. Engaged in their own nuclear arms race, the two superpowers pursued their own bilateral nuclear arms control negotiations to manage their strategic relationship. Until the CTBT negotiation, multilateral nuclear arms control was mostly limited to the Treaty for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The NPT reflected the desire of many non-nuclear states to become involved in nuclear arms control and use multilateral agreements to place obligations on the nuclear-weapon states. While both bilateral and multilateral nuclear arms control often languished due to disagreements, multilateral nuclear arms control negotiation has also dealt with the complexity of reconciling the perspectives of many states. This complexity has made the use of negotiation theories difficult, although if used pragmatically, theory can be a useful tool for the study of negotiation events. Through the test-ban resolution, New Zealand was able to contribute to the process of reaching consensus by acting as a facilitator. New Zealand is a good example of how a small non-nuclear state can make a useful contribution in multilateral nuclear arms control negotiation, typically dominated by large nuclear-weapon states, and still advance its national interests.

Ideally, a citizen is an individual who is a formal member of a self-governing political community, with individual rights and freedoms that are equal to those of other citizens, and which are protected by law. This thesis investigates how closely the citizenship status of non-Maori ethnic minorities in New Zealand approximated this ideal during the 1990s. Its particular focus is on how the neo-liberal ideology of National and Coalition Governments between 1990 and 1999, and those Governments' understandings of the nature and political significance of ethnicity, affected the ability of those belonging to non-Maori ethnic minority groups to be full and equal members of the New Zealand political community, with an equal capacity for self-governance at the individual level and as members of the political community. The thesis takes the form of a survey of public policy and law over a period of nine years. Five broad areas or aspects of public policy are examined: the collection and dissemination of official 'ethnic' statistics; immigration and citizenship policy; civil rights provided for in domestic and international law; mechanisms for ensuring access to political decision-making; and social policy. The question asked in the thesis is whether the policies developed and administered in each of these areas during the 1990s enriched or detracted from the citizenship status of non-Maori ethnic minorities.

In New Zealand there is a marked scarcity of material on the workings of the indigenous news media. This thesis is intended to partially fill the large gap in New Zealand scholarship in this area. It provides a case study of the production of meaning by mainstream New Zealand news media organisations. Its purpose is to explicate the dominant messages in circulation from 1981 through 1983 regarding unemployment. The neutral face of the news discourse is shown to conceal the routinized signification practices of journalistic professionalism. These practices act to separate the normative from the deviant. They also serve the interests of society's established and legitimated institutions. This process was aided by the simplistic, as opposed to simplified, nature of news media presentations.

This thesis proposes an alternative way of establishing a link between market orientation and electoral success, by focusing on market orientation as a message instead of as a management function. Using interpretive textual analysis the thesis examines the advertising messages of the highest polling political parties for evidence of voter orientation and competitor orientation in the 1999 and 2002 New Zealand general election campaigns. Relating manifest market orientation to a number of statistical indicators of electoral success the thesis looks for plausible associations between the visual manifestation of market orientation in political advertisements and parties' achievement of their party vote goals in the 1999 and 2002 elections. It offers party-focused explanations for electoral outcomes to complement existing voter-centric explanations, and adds another level of scholarly understanding of recent electoral outcomes in New Zealand.While the thesis finds little association between demonstration of competitor orientation in political advertisements and electoral success, it finds a plausible relationship between parties that demonstrated a voter orientation in their political advertisements and goal achievement. The parties that achieved their party vote goals in 1999 and 2002 tended to demonstrate an affinity for their target voter groups by showing images of voters and their environments and images of party leaders interacting with voters. They demonstrated concern for the satisfaction of the needs of existing voters by using words of togetherness and proving they had met their previous promises. They did not change their policy or leadership messages dramatically between campaigns. There was a visual consistency to their television, print and billboard advertising messages which rendered the messages easy to recognise and remember. They were clear about what they were offering in exchange for the party vote and recognised the need to offer something in addition to previous offerings in order to attract new voters.

The increased violence towards humanitarian workers represents an insidious trend throughout Afghanistan. Humanitarian workers have become legitimised targets since the 2001 US led invasion of Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom. The increased identification of NGOs with Western military forces and the Afghan government makes the aid community a target by association, whether it is a real or perceived association by the belligerents. Neutrality for NGOs in Afghanistan has been lost. Overwhelmingly, authors and aid practitioners make clear statements about NGOs being legitimised for violence due to the perception of complicity, propagated by either the armed forces themselves or Coalition political leaders. However, army officers involved in the civilian-military relationship are dismissive of the NGOs plight and believe the issue of NGO neutrality to be overplayed. Indeed the Coalition’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams and the NATO commander in Afghanistan believe that the lack of co-ordination or pooling of NGOs’ resources with the military or one another is an impediment to development and improving the security in Afghanistan. The Taliban have gained de facto military control over a growing number of provinces, emanating from the South with humanitarian space in that environment diminished so as to be non-existent. The civilian-military relationship is not responsible for the loss of humanitarian space in its entirety. Opium production, warlord-ism, banditry, corruption, conflict of cultures, religion, and external funding of terrorism marry to produce a uniquely hostile environment not conducive to humanitarian intervention. The lack of heterogeneity between what NGOs agree is acceptable collusion in a civilian-military context also makes it unlikely that accepted operating procedures will be adopted by the civilian humanitarian community as a whole.

No description available.