West B.A., Murphy F.T. A Brief History of Australia
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
190
austraLian MusiC
in the 1970s
w
hile in the 1970s the Swedish band Abba was selling millions
of singles and albums in Australia, being watched by millions
on Countdown, and attracting more than 1 percent of the population
to their live shows, several Australian bands and individuals were
making it big overseas. While Olivia Newton-John and the Gibb
brothers were all born in England, their immigration to Australia
in childhood has always marked Newton-John, the Bee Gees, and
Andy Gibb as Australian acts. All three were huge pop stars in the
1970s and provoked greater awareness of Australian culture in the
rest of the world.
Although very different from Newton-John and the Gibbs,
Australian music of the 1970s is incomplete without at least a men-
tion of AC/DC. The group formed in 1973 through the effort of the
brothers Malcolm and Angus Young, who had migrated to Australia
from Scotland as children. When they began playing together in
Australian malls, pubs, and clubs, Angus was just 18, and to play
on his youth, he always performed in a school uniform, made up of
shorts, long socks, blazer, tie, and cap. The group put out their first
album, High Voltage, in 1975; it was released outside Australia the
following year. Their following albums had considerable international
success with the lead singer Bon Scott, a fellow Scottish migrant.
After Scott’s death in 1980 the band was forced to regroup, this time
with the lead singer Brian Johnson. They had their greatest success
in 1980 with Johnson on lead vocals with Back in Black, which sat
at the top of the charts in England for months. Numerous albums
followed in the 1980s and beyond, including another chart-topping
album, Black Ice, in 2008. The news of this success has not been
welcomed in some corners of the English press, however, because
every time the group has been number one on the English charts,
the country has been on the verge of economic collapse; in 1980
unemployment neared 20 percent.
Source: Petridis, Alex. “Things Must Really Be Bad—AC/DC Are No. 1
Again.” Guardian (October 27, 2008). Available online. URL: http://www.
guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/27/acdc-music-recession. Accessed February
20, 2009.
191
CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
her daughter was sleeping. On
entering the tent she saw that
the baby was gone and sent
out an alarm. Search parties
never found the body, although
blood-stained clothes and a
diaper were discovered a week
later. The initial finding by the
coroner supported the claim of
a dingo attack: Witnesses had
heard growls from the tent,
footprints were seen leading
from the tent into the bush,
and blood was found inside the
tent. However, the Australian
media and public quickly
rejected this verdict, for dingo
attacks on humans are rela-
tively rare. The Chamberlains’
life for the next eight years
was turned upside down by
rumors, innuendo, and a legal
system that ignored many of
the basic facts of the case. As Seventh Day Adventists, the Chamberlains
were depicted in the media as members of a fanatical cult that supported
human sacrifice; the name Azaria was even rumored to mean “sacrifice
in the wilderness” (Hogg n.d.). In fact, the book used by Lindy to name
her child, 101 Unusual Baby Names, lists its meaning as “Blessed by God”
(Harry M. Miller Management Group).
After the initial coroner’s report was rejected, Lindy Chamberlain was
arrested, tried, and convicted of murdering her daughter in the family
car, burying the body, and then later exhuming it to retrieve the bloody
clothing to plant in a strategic spot a week later (Hogg n.d.). Michael
Chamberlain was convicted as an accessory to murder. Lindy was
sentenced to life in prison with hard labor and even after two appeals
processes failed to achieve justice for herself and her family. Finally, in
1986 a final piece of Azaria’s clothing, her jacket, was found at Uluru
and supported the Chamberlains’ explanations and not-guilty pleas. As
a result, the Northern Territory authorities released Lindy from jail. A
royal commission established in 1987 weighed all the evidence, minus
Lindy and Michael Chamberlain outside
court, September 1982. The Chamberlains
spent much of the 1980s entering and exit-
ing courtrooms in an attempt to clear their
names.
(Canberra Times/ nla.pic-vn3062137/
National Library of Australia)
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
192
the media frenzy and endless rumors, and found her innocent. The final
piece of the puzzle in reclaiming both her freedom and her reputation
was granted Lindy in September 1988 when the Northern Territory
Court of Criminal Appeal quashed both her and her husband’s criminal
convictions entirely.
Tragedy
While Australians had experienced numerous political and pop cul-
ture events in the 1974–83 period, none touched as many Australians
directly as the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires. The period up to
February 16, 1983, was one of the driest periods in recorded history
in the southeastern state of Victoria. Winter rainfall in 1982 had been
well below average, and by mid-February summer rainfall was down
75 percent (Department of Sustainability and Environment 2009).
From November 25, 1982, through early February 1983, Victoria and
South Australia experienced five significant bushfires, alerting all rel-
evant agencies and individuals that this would be a more dangerous
fire season than had been previously experienced. To make matters
worse, the dry conditions combined with strong winds to create a mas-
sive dust storm on February 9, in which more than 90 million pounds
(40.8 million kg) of topsoil was lifted into the air, blocking out the sun
in Melbourne and hampering the efforts of firefighters throughout the
two states (Department of Sustainability and Environment 2009).
On the morning of February 16 southeastern Australians woke to
clear skies for one of the first days in a week. A biting north wind
was blowing heat in from the country’s central desert region and tem-
peratures soared above 105°F (40.5°C); humidity dipped below 15
percent. Numerous fires, caused by sparks from power lines, arson, and
other causes, were pushed along in narrow strips from north to south,
advancing toward the coast. Burning debris from these initial fires lit
other fires, so that by the end of the day more than 100 fires were burn-
ing in Victoria and South Australia (Department of Sustainability and
Environment 2009).
While these conditions were very difficult for the various fire authori-
ties to deal with, they were not unfamiliar. The most severe problem of
the day emerged later in the afternoon, when the hot northerly wind
suddenly changed direction and a strong west wind blew in from the
coast. This was disastrous in terms of loss of life, property, trees, and
wildlife because it turned relatively narrow bands of fire moving north to
south into miles-wide fires moving rapidly west to east. The change was
193
CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
so sudden that 47 Victorians and 28 South Australians were unable to
get out of the fires’ path and died. Significant property damage occurred
in both states as well, with 2,080 families left homeless in Victoria and
a further 383 in South Australia; in the 892 square miles (2,310 km
2
)
directly affected by fire were farms, stock, equipment, forest plantations,
towns, and other resources worth between AU$350 and AU$400 million
(Department of Sustainability and Environment 2009).
In the aftermath of the fires, soil erosion, fears for the survival of
native wildlife, and even the fear that revegetation could not occur
because of their severity played in the minds of many Australians.
Nonetheless, the Australian landscape proved itself to be as tough as
the people who reside there. Homes were rebuilt, farms and plantations
reestablished, and within a week of the fires’ being extinguished, small
green shoots could be seen emerging from the blackened soil and tree
trunks. Unfortunately this rejuvenation in 1983 meant that fuel has
been readily available for subsequent major bushfires in these regions,
with none as severe as the February 2009 fires, which surpassed the
death and destruction of the Ash Wednesday fires many times over.
Conclusion
Politically, the year 1983 marked the transition from the bitterness
of the Whitlam–Fraser years to 13 years of consecutive Labor rule in
Australia. Economically, the 1980s also witnessed important changes,
since Fraser’s government had been unable to deal with the upward
spiral of unemployment with its concomitant downward spiral in
Australians’ standard of living. Socially and culturally, the 1980s and
early 1990s also ushered in significant changes, for in this period
bipartisan support for multiculturalism, which had been introduced
by Harold Holt and then nurtured by the Whitlam and Fraser govern-
ments, began to wither. The contradictions and changes wrought by
these changes are the subject of the following chapter, which looks at
the years 1983–96.
194
9
ContradiCtion
and Change
(1983–1996)
a
fter Gough Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975 and eight years of Liberal
government under Malcolm Fraser, the Australian Labor Party
under Bob Hawke won its first of a record-breaking five elections in
a row, which kept them in power until 1996. In their 13 years in gov-
ernment, Labor oversaw the first phases of the country’s “fundamental
economic restructuring” toward a more unfettered capitalism (Painter
1998, 2). Unlike their contemporaries in the United States and the
United Kingdom, however, the ruling party in Australia did not take
up right-wing social policies; Asian immigration, Aboriginal rights,
and multiculturalism more generally remained on Labor’s agenda dur-
ing the entire period. Labor in these years also reintroduced universal
health care, a Whitlam-era policy that had been abandoned by Fraser.
Perhaps in reaction to Labor’s almost wholesale adoption of tradition-
ally Liberal economic policies, the Liberal opposition gave up its prior
support for the tenets of multiculturalism and turned its social policies
rightward.
Economic Rationalism
Bob Hawke and the Labor Party took over the Commonwealth gov-
ernment in 1983 during a period of prolonged economic difficulty.
Unemployment was 10.4 percent and had been high for nearly a decade;
the national deficit was more than AU$9.6 billion (Welsh 2004, 532).
During the previous eight years, few if any of the solutions to these
economic problems attempted by Malcolm Fraser had done much good
and Australians were hungry for change. Bob Hawke stepped into the
prime minister’s office in March 1983 and immediately began to speak
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CONTRADICTION AND CHANGE
“of ‘bringing Australians together,’ . . . about ‘the kids in despair,’ of
kids using drugs, and of the break-up of family life in Australia” (Clark
1995, 324). He “believed Labor could reduce unemployment, inflation,
and the number of industrial disputes” (Clark 1995, 324) and set his
government to work on these tasks. With his “man of the people” per-
sona, Hawke is said by many commentators to have maintained a love
affair with the Australian people that kept him in office through four
federal elections and several internal challenges (Mills 1993, 2).
Although the Hawke government benefited from good luck, such as
the end of the multiyear drought immediately after the 1983 election,
they should be credited with going beyond the charisma of their leader
and achieving many of their early aims. Within six months unemploy-
ment figures had finally dropped, inflation was decreasing, and the
number of industrial disputes declined (Clark 1995, 325). Hawke’s
politics of consensus have largely been credited for his early success.
As a Labor prime minister, Hawke was able to draw the most power-
ful Australian unions to the bargaining table and convince them with
the Prices and Incomes Accord that lower wages were an acceptable
trade-off for rising employment (Clarke 2003, 316). Additionally, Labor
under Treasurer Paul Keating floated the Australian dollar—that is, its
international value was determined by the balance of payments rather
than at a fixed percentage of the U.S. dollar—and allowed foreign-
owned banks to operate in Australia for the first time. These modern-
izing tactics were deemed necessary to recover from the decades since
World War II, during which the Liberals had allowed the economy to
stagnate (Robins 1989, S5).
While these fiscal policies contributed to positive changes in the
Australian economy over the next decade and beyond, Hawke and
Keating did not stop there. By the end of Labor’s reign in 1996, the
government had instituted a series of free-market reforms that robbed
the Liberals of their economic platform and “for the most part[,] would
not [have been] at odds with those of Mrs Margaret Thatcher” (Robins
1989, S6). In 1985 Paul Keating tried to institute a general goods and
services tax and, when that failed, reformed the tax system to lessen the
burden on the highest-earning individuals and corporations. Protective
tariffs on Australian goods were also lowered, from an average of 34
percent in 1983 to less than 10 percent when Labor left office in 1996
(Welsh 2004, 533). The Hawke government also began two decades
of asset sales, whereby publicly owned property such as banks, utility
companies, and even roads and police stations either were sold to pri-
vate interests or had their maintenance and building costs paid for by
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
196
private companies. The first of these sales was of a lucrative property
in Tokyo that had once housed the Australian embassy, which netted
the government nearly AU$700 million in revenue over several years
(Hawker 2006, 250). While all of these changes were highly symbolic
of Labor’s new economic “ideology of free trade and economic rational-
ism” (Clarke 2003, 328), perhaps the most important symbol was the
use of the government’s Hercules troop planes to break an airline pilots’
strike in 1989 (Douglas and Cunningham 1992, 5). Labor, the party of
the union movement and working people more generally, turned to the
military to break a strike.
Even immigration, which had dominated postwar Australia, was
transformed during the Hawke-Keating years on the basis of the ideol-
ogy of economic rationalism. The turning point in this process was in
1988, when the Committee to Advise on Australia’s Immigration Policies
released its report, “Immigration—a Commitment to Australia,” some-
times also called the Fitzgerald Report. Claiming to be responding to
the concerns of a large number of Australians about high immigration
rates, the report argued that Australia’s immigrant “selection methods
need a sharper economic focus, for the public to be convinced that
the program is in Australia’s interests” (Committee to Advise 1988, 1).
In the aftermath, and especially after Keating took office in 1991, fees
were introduced for migrant services, such as visa applications and the
appeals process, and new migrants themselves were denied access to
health care for their first six months of residence in the country (Jupp
2002, 55–56). As a result of these and other policies, the number of
immigrants radically decreased in this period (Jupp 2007, 46).
Many economists would have agreed with Paul Keating when he
stated, after a 20 percent fall in the value of the Australian dollar in
1986, that Australia was at risk of becoming little more than a banana
republic and needed economic restructuring to favor free markets and
other neoliberal reforms (Robins 1989). Nonetheless, there is another
side of the story. Labor’s adoption of traditional right-wing economic
policies lowered the unemployment rate but also increased income
inequality (Harding 1995, 31) and the poverty rate, which, according
to an OECD estimate, rose from 14.4 to 16.1 percent between 1981–82
and 1989–90 (cited in Department of Families, Community Services
2000, 6.3). Real wages in Australia fell significantly from 1984 through
1989, and then more slowly (Clarke 2003, 318), to result in a lower
standard of living for most of the middle class. The Australian political
scientist Michael Hogan argues that “the great losers from the Keating
years have not been the potential underclass, but the great bulk of
197
CONTRADICTION AND CHANGE
middle-income earners, especially those at the lower end of that scale”
(1995, 183).
While Labor was sacrificing the middle class on the altar of eco-
nomic rationalism, the Left’s traditional concern for the poor did not
diminish. Instead, the welfare state itself was transformed from one in
which “welfare entitlements are meant for all citizens” (Hogan 1995,
183) to one that in many ways became more progressive, or what the
economist Ann Harding calls more “pro-poor” (1995, 30). The most
affluent members of Australian society lost access to a number of
welfare benefits, including free university education, a benefit lost to
all Australians in subsequent years, while targeted social welfare was
directed toward the poorest percentage of the population. This target-
ing mitigated some of the effects of wage inequalities that developed in
this period, at least for the poorest segment of society, but also resulted
in a middle-class backlash against Labor in the second half of the 1990s
and first half-decade of the new millennium.
Another area in which traditional Left politics were not abandoned
was in the reintroduction in 1984 of a single-payer health insurance
scheme, Medibank, which had been introduced by Whitlam and dis-
mantled by Fraser. Under the Hawke-Keating system, every taxpayer
was required to contribute 1 percent of his or her taxable income to the
scheme and in return every Australian would receive low or no-cost
health care. In subsequent years incentives for wealthier Australians to
take out private health coverage have been added to the system, but the
Labor dream of health care for all has not been abandoned.
Symbolic Politics
For many Australians in 2009, the Hawke-Keating years do not call up
memories of economic rationalism or Ronald Reagan–inspired theories
of the trickle-down effects of neoliberalism. The further tack to the
Right of the following Howard Liberal government (1996–2007) meant
that Labor’s complicity in this process has been somewhat erased from
public memory. What has not disappeared, however, are the other
aspects of the Hawke-Keating years, “the non-measurable arena of sym-
bolic politics” (Hogan 1995, 187). One of the symbols of the dawning
of a new age was the 1988 opening in Canberra of the country’s new
AU$1.1 billion Parliament House, built into a hillside overlooking Lake
Burley Griffin. Another important symbol for the times was the entre-
preneur Alan Bond’s victory in the 1983 America’s Cup yacht race with
Australia II, a 39-foot (12-m) yacht captained by John Bertrand. Bond’s
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
198
Brian Burke, premier of Western Australia, and Alan Bond showing off the America’s Cup at
the Royal Perth Yacht Club in 1983.
(National Archives of Australia: A6135, K3/11/83/36)
The new parliament building nestles into the hillside and gives the impression of being part
of the landscape.
(Clearviewstock/Shutterstock)
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CONTRADICTION AND CHANGE
combination of business acumen and patriotic sporting flair seemed
to issue forth “a national awakening of a sort” (Australianbeers.com
2006). His later conviction for fraud, jail term, and bankruptcy pro-
ceedings have tainted his personal image, but not the America’s Cup
victory.
For the Labor government the two most important symbolic are-
nas of the time were an increased openness to Asia and dialogue on
Aboriginal rights. During the Keating years the Australian republican
movement, which aims to replace the British monarch as head of state
with an Australian, also gained new impetus. As with Labor’s economic
policies, however, even some of these symbolic arenas were sites of
contradiction in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Asia
While of the two it is Paul Keating who is most remembered for his
focus on Australia’s relationship with other Asia-Pacific countries, as
prime minister, Bob Hawke was similarly interested in pursuing an
Asian agenda. At the time he argued “that finding Australia’s ‘true place
in Asia’ would be one [of] Australia’s most important challenges” (cited
in Lovell 2007, 9).
One of the most important of the Hawke government’s legacies in
the area of engagement with Asia was the creation in 1989 of the Asia-
Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group. Today APEC is made up
of 21 countries located in or on the border of the Asia-Pacific region,
contains about 40 percent of the world’s population, and accounts for
nearly 55 percent of global GDP (About APEC 2009). In 1989, how-
ever, the group that met in Canberra was much smaller; it consisted of
representatives from just 12 countries and did not include such impor-
tant players in the region as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Russia. In
addition, while the United States was a founding member of APEC,
it was not until 1992 and the election of Bill Clinton that the United
States became actively engaged in it. By then Paul Keating had replaced
Bob Hawke as prime minister of Australia and the two new lead-
ers began the tradition of a yearly APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting
(About APEC 2009). Indeed, APEC is often listed as a Keating initiative
and success story because of his ability to draw the United States into
the core decision-making process and strengthen the group’s ties more
generally.
Aside from his treasurer’s love of Asia, much of the driving force
for Bob Hawke’s engagement with Asia prior to June 1989 was China’s
economic liberalization, which he believed was “the single most impor-