New developments: Recalibrating civil society—the case of Australia

This article offers an overview of recent attempts to reconfigure the relationship between state and civil society in Australia. The article offers five models of how state/civil society relations might play out under the Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal government. These models include corporate, nostalgic, technological, neo-liberal, and the UK government’s Big Society variants. The article concludes that the Turnbull government’s approach to civic renewal is not innovative, and has reverted to a thin corporate model of state/civil society relations.