Victoria University Corporate Profile
Research highlights
1999
Victoria’s community of scholars are involved in wide-ranging research and scholarship. A few of the highlights are:
- ANTARCTIC RESEARCH: Earth sciences were an early speciality and this tradition continues today with Peter Barrett who heads Victoria’s Antarctic Research Centre. Professor Barrett is leading the six-nation Cape Roberts research project, which is investigating the frozen continent’s geological and climatic past. Team members have had to overcome enormous technical difficulties to drill through the Ross Sea ice sheet to produce core stata from 40-100 million years ago. This work is of international importance because of what it might reveal about climatic changes in history and the link to current concerns about global warming. Through this work, Barrett has extensive international links with institutions in the US, the UK, Germany and Italy.
- SUPERCONDUCTORS: Since 1987, research teams at Victoria University and Industrial Research Ltd, a Crown Research Institute, have together established themselves as world leaders in the exciting new field of high-temperature superconductor research. High-temperature superconductors — copper oxide-based ceramics that conduct electricity without loss of energy – have been under intense international study since their discovery in 1986. They offer the potential to save power and develop devices such as ‘levitating’ trains. Victoria physicists led by Joe Trodahl, from the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, are working closely with IRL colleagues, and have jointly developed a superconducting material that has become the world standard in key applications. This project has also been studied from the management point of view by Sally Davenport of the School of Business and Public Management.
- BUILDING AND THE ENVIRONMENT: Designing and building environmentally-sound residential and commercial buildings requires accurate information about the properties of materials — information that has been hard to find. The School of Architecture’s Centre for Building Performance Research, under the leadership of George Baird, is filling that information gap with a series of publications on the ‘embodied energy’ required to produce different types of common building materials. It is doing this ground-breaking work with support from the Building Research Association of New Zealand. The construction and operation of buildings account for a significant part of the world’s energy resources. By understanding more about this topic, architects around the world have the potential to make huge financial and environmental savings.
- NEW ZEALAND DICTIONARY CENTRE: Victoria University has long been a pioneer in research on New Zealand English lexicography and is the country’s main centre of research in the field. In partnership with Oxford University Press, Victoria recently set up the New Zealand Dictionary Centre. The centre provides a base for research into language. At its heart lies the New Zealand Dictionary Centre database, largely the result of 44 years of collection and research by lexicographer and former Victoria English Department lecturer Harry Orsman. His Dictionary of New Zealand English, the largest ever on New Zealand English, was drawn from this database and comprises 1.5 million words and 47,000 quotations. Ongoing work of the centre includes research on New Zealand English, the fastest changing English language in the world, and the preparation of a range of Oxford dictionaries which reflect the distinctive characteristics of language use in New Zealand.
- MUSICAL COMPOSITION: Victoria University’s School of Music is very highly regarded, equally strong in classical performance, composition and musicology. Its strength in composition dates to when Douglas Lilburn joined the teaching staff in 1947. Today four of New Zealand’s leading composers — Jack Body, Ross Harris, John Young and John Psathas — teach at Victoria and all have achieved great success in recent years. Body and Harris have completed operas (Alley and King Lear respectively). Dr Young has won international prizes for his electro-acoustic music, and Psathas has his work performed regularly by percussion superstar Evelyn Glennie. “They are a unique national resource,” says Head of School, Peter Walls. “It is most unusual for a university to have four composers on its staff, let alone ones as prolific, successful and stylistically different as these. In fact, I cannot think of another university, even the likes of Cambridge, which has such strength in the area.”
- NEW ZEALAND POLITICAL CHANGE PROJECT: After New Zealand adopted the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system in 1996, a team of four senior Victoria University political scientists formed the New Zealand Political Change Project to study its long-term impact, with funding from the state Foundation for Research, Science and Technology. Project director, Stephen Levine, says that what New Zealand did was unique. “As an English-speaking Commonwealth country it discarded its traditional first-past-the-post voting system in favour of a European list-system of proportional representation. That … would have been unthinkable as little as 20 years ago.” Dr Levine, with Jonathan Boston, Elizabeth McLeay and Nigel Roberts were awarded the New Zealand Electoral Commission’s inaugural Wallace Award for their first book. A second book is planned for 1999.
- LABOUR MARKET REFORM: Deregulation of the New Zealand labour market has attracted interest worldwide. The Employment Institutions Project was established in 1987 and the effect of legislative and structural change on the labour market has been under scrutiny ever since. The project is located in the Industrial Relations Centre, which is in the Graduate School of Business and Government Management. The project leaders are Pat Walsh and Raymond Harbridge. Professor Harbridge, who has been the director of the project since it began, now divides his time between La Trobe University in Melbourne, and Victoria. The day-to-day management of the project is in the hands of senior research fellow Aaron Crawford. Since 1991,the project has focused mostly on the impact of the Employment Contracts Act on the structure and process of bargaining over employment conditions, and on the content of collective employment contracts. Another focus has been the structure and operation of trade unions in the deregulated environment. The project, in association with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, stages a popular annual seminar series which updates the project’s findings to businesses, unions, consultants and others wanting to benchmark employment conditions. The project is funded by the Public Good Science Fund.
- JURY DECISION-MAKING: A recent research project on jury decision-making, headed by Warren Young of the Faculty of Law and undertaken with the New Zealand Law Commission, builds on and affirms Victoria’s reputation for high quality research in criminology and criminal justice. For the first time outside the United States, researchers were permitted to interview jurors (over 300 in a sample of 50 trials) about their approach to, and understanding of, the case as well as the jury’s collective decision-making process. Preliminary findings show that, while juries are almost always conscientious in their approach to the task, their performance is variable. Where juries do have difficulties, most of these can be attributed to the poor support the system provides. The study suggests that much can be done to improve juries’ decision-making without affecting the important role they play in our justice system. Final results will be published in mid-1999.
- COMPARATIVE LAW: New Zealand is making an important contribution to the study of comparative law. The New Zealand Association for Comparative Law is housed at Victoria’s Faculty of Law, and a number of Victoria law staff, headed by Tony Angelo, contribute research to its Yearbook publications. Professor Angelo, who is President of the Association, says the study of key issues in foreign legal systems leads to a better understanding of one’s own by offering a point of comparison and an ability to discuss concepts in the light of alternatives. The knowledge acquired can then be used for law reform purposes. The Law Faculty’s focus in this area has been Japan and the French Pacific. The NZ Association for Comparative Law is affiliated to the International Association of Legal Science, a UNESCO body.
- COMPETITION AND REGULATION: Since 1984, deregulation and privatisation have completely reshaped the New Zealand economy. Private ownership and management of infrastructure industries has placed much greater emphasis on competition, and competition law, as the basis for economic efficiency. The economic performance of markets and organisations is the research focus of the New Zealand Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation. The executive director is Lewis Evans who is the leading academic economist in New Zealand working on microeconomics and its interface with competition law. The Institute has a grant from the New Zealand Law Foundation to study the operation of the Commerce Act. A study of whether it was in the public interest to privatise New Zealand’s railways is being conducted under a grant from the Treasury. Studies of the market performance of state-owned-enterprises and of the telecommunications industry are also underway; an investigation into the relative costs of local telephony service has recently been completed.