This thesis sets out to examine the capacity of new governments to influence partisan-based policy and legislation. It examines two newly elected Queensland governments - the Nicklin Country-Liberal government in 1957- 1961 and the Goss Labor government in 1989- 1990 and analyses the introduction by those governments of major industrial relations legislative reform. The Nicklin Coalition government was elected to the Queensland parliament in 1957 after the collapse of the Gair Labor government. The Coalition was committed to extensive industrial relations legislative reform but had not prepared for, or anticipated the constitutional, administrative and legal problems associated with such reform. Nor had it taken into account the concessions that would need to be made to the state's trade unions in order to effect its reforms. Consequently it was not until 1961 that it found the time was propitious for the introduction of its major legislative reforms and the restructuring of the state's principal industrial relations legislation. By contrast, in 1989 the Goss government elected as a consequence of the National Party's collapse in the face of the Fitzgerald Inquiry of 1987 had prepared itself for government. As a result it was able to take advantage of its newly elected status and the existence of the Hanger Report (1988) to introduce its legislative intentions quickly, in such a way that it did not alienate the business community. Preparation and circumstances therefore allowed Labor to repeal earlier legislation supported by business and introduce its own changes with little or no opposition. The thesis concludes that their political and economic inheritance and the existing policy environment will in varying degrees limit new governments. But their ability to introduce partisan-based legislative change quickly is also determined by the degree of preparation for the process of government, undertaken prior to their election. This thesis demonstrates that new governments can make a difference and effect changes to the industrial relations environment. However if this potential is to be realised and new governments are to take advantage of their newly elected status it will require a significant degree of administrative preparation or a considerable period of acclimatisation to the rigours of office.

This study sets out to explore first person theatre as a means of opening the individual to the problems of contemporary capitalism and its increasing pervasion of the personal in an era of embeddedness enabled by networked pervasive technology. Firstly setting out key definitions and a theoretical analysis of the problems of being in the digital age in chapter 1, and then setting this against the history of interaction in performance in chapter 2. The study then goes on (in chapters 3-5) to investigate three key aspects of first person performance as personal-as-political; sound and the city, play and games, and interactive theatre. In the final chapter, The Umbrella Project develops a piece of first person theatre as practice, a method of investigation that is vital to a thesis that discusses politics, late capitalism, and the means to resist the message-sending of private interests as fundamentally only to be understood in practice. For this reason, too, chapters 3, 4 and 5 are supported by key case studies discussing other first person theatre practice. By placing the participant at the centre of the world-constituting process of theatre in the hot space between what is and what if this study suggests that first person theatre is able to open the contemporary individual to an inbetween where they might re-see, reflect and react to what is. To imagine and, if wished, act upon a what if. In an age of the disrupted near and far, the vanishing of the interface, of the false rhetoric of choice of personalisation , and the often false rhetoric of agency at the end of the era of broadcast, first person theatre offers the subject a route to individual agency, an understanding of the urban environment as construct, and to their relationship with the subjective other something which this thesis suggests is a personal-as-political practice to rival the Spectacle of late capitalism.