Corruption has been much discussed in Australia over the last few years and interest has been hightened recently through the revelations of police officers in Queensland. By the way, Australia's prosecution system is derived from England. Accordingly, in New South Wales [NSW], there was not an avenue of criminal procedure by the public prosecutor. For that reason, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption [ICAO] Act 1988 was established. The operations of the ICAC have been expected by the public, and it has produced satisfactory results. However the ICAC has been anxious about the exercise of its investigative function, as evidenced by the fact that the ICAC has never used its police powers. Additionally, there are same problems with the operation of increase space the ICAC. These are the broad definition of corrupt conduct and the Commission's power to issue itself a research warrant. Although we should be understood against the there has been an atmosphere of some criticism surrounding the establishment and operation of the ICAC, there are valuable lessons which can be learned from this process.

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This paper attempts to examine political actions in Canberra, relating them to its urban development, The examination has revealed the following.(1) To cope with the population increase in Canberra, it has been argued that the choice lies between forming new residential districts in the surrounding rural areas or intensification of densities at existing population centres. Whether the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC, the central government agency in charge of development in Canberra) adopts a conventional dispersed settlement plan or a concentrated settlement plan, it cannot carry forward prospective development plans without causing undesirable consequences to some residents in established areas.(2) Canberra nowadays. consists of three areas in terms of their stages of development. They are developing areas, established areas, and redeveloping areas. Residents often take political action in the developing areas and redeveloping areas. While political action groups in the developing areas assume a form of "prevention" of development, ones in the redeveloping areas aim at "promotion" of development.(3) When serious social problems emerge in Canberra, leaders organise a new political action group, or reactivate a group which was organised in the past for political actions. Leaders of political action groups do not use other groups to mobilise residents. Because people are not so integrated in their residential areas, it is more difficult in Canberra to mobilise people to political actions than in urban Japan. Residents in Canbera join political action groups only when issues seriously threaten their lifestyles. This can explain why political actions often occur in developing areas and redeveloping areas, where many serious issues emerge.(4) Canberra nowadays is composed mainly of middle or upper middle class people. Because of their high socio-economic status, people often organise "pre-prevention types" of political action.(5) A city has an inclination to centralisation as a result of economic competition. In defiance of this force, the NCDC constructed the four "towns" in Canberra with the intention of decentralising the city.Because the NCDC was not able to resist pressure from the private sector, the redevelopment of Civic (the town centre of Inner Canberra) commenced and Canberra has begun to become a more centralised city. The failure of the NCDC's decentralisation plan may point to a limitation of urban planning. A city reveals its real character, even though urban planners attempt to inhibit it from appearing.

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The rapid increase of the number of migrants from non English speaking countries ( NESB : Non English Speaking Background) since the eighties has brought the problems of their economic status in Australian up to the surface. In this paper, we discuss the extent to which they are handicapped on each stage of job search due to their linguistical difficulties. We first consider the fact that the unemployment rate of NESB is significantly higher than that of other groups. Our analysis shows that the difference of umemployment rates between them is not caused by factors such as the differences in educational achievement, qualifications on demographical compositions. It is emphasised, rather, that a significant part of their umemployment is due to their English inability. We then discuss the difficulties in getting access to information on job vacancies that the job seeker may suffer from if he/she cannot manage English sufficiently in Australia. The examination of preceding studies and the results of our field research elucidate the seriousness of this problem among NESB. We next focus on the fact that the distribution of the employment of NESB among industriesis heavily distorted toward the manufacturing sector. The results of some surveys and statistical data strongly indicate that it is because of less serious requirement with language capability in the sector.In order to confirm this argument, we apply an econometric analysis to a micro-data set which was collected at a manufacturing company. The analsis shows that ethnic factors such as nationality, language and birth place do not have significant roles in obtaining jobs in that company at all. Finally, on the basis of these analysis, we suggest that the importance of improving NESB's English ability need to be more seriously recongnised in making policies to raise their economic and social status.

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[in Japanese]

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