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Meaningful crime prevention or just an 'Act': discourse analysis of the criminalisation of contract cheating services in Australia

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posted on 2023-05-21, 07:41 authored by Groves, A, Victoria NagyVictoria Nagy
Contract cheating remains a significant problem for universities and higher education (HE) generally, both within Australia and internationally. In 2020, the Australian Federal Government passed legislation establishing a new criminal offence, criminalising the provision or advertisement of academic cheating services by individuals and businesses. This legislation represents the Australian Government’s formal commitment to a criminal justice response to address the problem of contract cheating behaviour, which seeks to prevent and minimise the use and/or promotion of such cheating services within the higher education sector. This paper provides a political discourse analysis (PDA) and interpretive policy analysis (IPA) of Australian Parliamentary Hansard documents regarding debate of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment (Prohibiting Academic Cheating Services) Bill 2019. Our findings suggest a discord between the putative purpose of this legislation and the way the contract cheating problem has been represented in Australian Parliament. We argue that debates regarding the solution to, or at least how to address contract cheating first need to understand and agree on the problem if they are to meaningfully prevent crime. Our analysis exposes the politicisation of the higher education sector and associated discourse, where concern about contract cheating, in this case, was used as a vehicle to further rationalise ongoing Government paternalism and interference in tertiary institutions, underscoring the need for critical evaluation of criminological interventions.

History

Publication title

Crime, Law and Social Change

Volume

78

Pagination

295-319

ISSN

0925-4994

Department/School

School of Social Sciences

Publisher

Springer Netherlands

Place of publication

Netherlands

Rights statement

© 2022 The Authors. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Higher education; Public services policy advice and analysis; Crime prevention

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