Peter Ferguson

“Professional politicians” have been lamented for their perceived negative impact on representative democracy. However, the concept of “political professionalisation” is deployed inconsistently, making these claims difficult to assess. This article develops a framework to measure professionalisation across two dimensions: career professionalisation (capturing MPs' changing career trajectories) and legislative professionalisation (describing the changing character of parliamentary service). These measures are used to determine whether professionalism increased in the Parliament of Australia between 1950 and 2023. There is strong evidence of career professionalisation from the 1950s to the 2010s in the pre‐parliamentary educational and occupational backgrounds of members. However, other measures of career professionalisation are either inconclusive (i.e., prior elected service) or have declined since the late 1980s (average age of MPs) and early 2000s (duration of service). The legislative professionalisation trends are also mixed. A fivefold increase in politically appointed staff clearly indicates professionalisation, while a steady rise in basic remuneration as a proportion of the median wage from the early 1990s demonstrates professionalisation, although this followed a period of de‐professionalisation between the early 1950s and late 1980s. Finally, parliamentary service is marked by an increase in the prevalence of professional values. Overall, no decisive trend towards professionalisation is identified.

It has been observed that the Paris Agreement has become an “analogy” of diplomatic success and institutional design because it allows emissions reduction commitments to be determined at the national level. While this is widely attributed to the United States’ insistence on excluding any provisions that would have required US Senate ratification, the success of Paris stems more from the way the agreement partly circumvents the divergent interests of developed and developing countries by allowing states to pursue their own mitigation strategies based on domestic distributional and ideological politics rather than interstate cooperation and/or competition. It is this accommodation of both an institutionalist logic of absolute gains and a more realist logic of relative gains that ultimately underpins the diplomatic and institutional design success of Paris. However, the resonance of realism, at least in its neoclassical form, also stems from its greater capacity to accommodate the heightened socioecological complexity, interconnectedness, and unknowability occasioned by the Anthropocene than other branches of Anthropocentric international relations theory. This potential is outlined in this Forum article by sketching the epistemological and ontological connections between neoclassical realism and the concept of resilience.

Leaving parliament is often a time of significant financial, employment and emotional difficulty for MPs. However, few studies have examined the support provided by parliaments to departing and former members. Consequently, parliaments lack access to best-practice case studies to improve the transitional experience for MPs. This article develops five benchmarks for supporting former MPs, covering transitional financial assistance; retirement income; career, financial, life transitions and redundancy counselling; mental health and medical services; and social and networking opportunities. These benchmarks are used to assess the support provided to former members by 22 selected ‘professional parliaments’. Although most of these parliaments offer adequate retirement income, none currently provide sufficient transitional financial assistance for MPs who depart before pensionable age. In all cases, improvements are also required to mental health and other counselling services. Most parliaments provide adequate social and networking opportunities. Implementing and extending these measures will improve the transitional experience of former MPs and enhance democratic rotation by reducing impediments to high-quality candidates from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds from seeking political office, while easing the exit of MPs who are ready to leave.

‘Resilience’ has become a central, albeit ambiguous, concept in environmental and development governance discourse since the mid‐2000s. However, whether this constitutes merely the updating of the language of sustainable development or a new discourse of environmental and development governance is unclear. Resilience is often characterised as a form of neoliberal governmentality that seeks to individualise the mitigation of ecological risks, implying that it is simply an extension of neoliberal sustainable development. However, this elides other possible articulations of resilience within environmental and development governance discourse more broadly. By developing and applying an innovative discourse analysis method, this article clarifies the relationship between sustainable development and resilience across these wider fields. We find that resilience is also articulated as a response to the failure of neoliberal sustainable development; as an integrating discourse of climate security and sustainable development; as a prerequisite for sustainable development; and as qualitatively different to sustainable development.

Case: In this report, we present the case of a patient undergoing en-bloc resection of a large triceps soft-tissue sarcoma, requiring reconstruction of the triceps tendon including its distal insertion. We describe a surgical technique using fascia lata (FL) autograft to reconstruct the patient's extensor mechanism with long-term follow-up and functional results. Conclusions: FL autograft is a viable option for reconstruction of large tendinous defects. It is simple and straightforward to harvest, inexpensive when compared with alternatives, with many potential applications.