West B.A., Murphy F.T. A Brief History of Australia
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
210
have been called into question by the [Mabo] decision” (Hagen 1999).
While symbolically the act may have been useful for Keating and Labor
to separate themselves from the Liberal opposition, for many Aboriginal
people it represented business as usual by an occupying government.
Another important piece of symbolic politics enacted during Paul
Keating’s years as prime minister was the inquiry begun by the Human
Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) on the Aboriginal
Stolen Generations. For two years starting in 1995, the HREOC engaged
in the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Children From Their Families. Eventually, the report
found that widespread human rights abuses had taken place and that
an apology and compensation were due to thousands of Indigenous
Australians. Unfortunately by that time Keating was out of office and
the report’s recommendations were not taken up by the subsequent
government, an issue that will be addressed in the next chapter.
In the main, Labor during this period “supported policies of indig-
enous self-determination . . . but the politics of land rights, treaty and
reparation for colonial policy seemed to be a greater challenge than
expected and impeded by economic rationalist members of the Hawke-
Keating ministries” (Lovell 2007, 10). Political will turned out to be
insufficient to the task, and Indigenous Australians today are still wait-
ing for most of the promises of the 1980s to be honored; reconciliation
remains a distant dream and recompense has been rejected outright by
the current government.
Republicanism
The third highly symbolic arena in which Labor acted in the 1980s
and 1990s was exploring the ramifications for Australia of changing its
form of government from a constitutional monarchy to a republic, with
an Australian head of state replacing the British queen (or king). This
began in 1985 when the Hawke government signed the Australia Act,
which finally separated the British legislature and courts from those in
the Australian states. The most noted of these connections had been the
ability of the British Privy Court to overturn decisions of the supreme
courts of all the Australian states; the Australian High Court had already
been separated from such overruling in 1975. Before Australia and the
United Kingdom enacted their parallel bills, the Australian states and
territories had been legal British colonies, although Australia itself had
not had that designation since 1901 (Australia Act 1986).
Republicanism began to gain real momentum in Australia in 1991
when the Labor Party placed it on its platform. Within a few months the
211
CONTRADICTION AND CHANGE
Australian Republican Movement (ARM) was formed by such notable
Australians as the novelist Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s Ark;
the cricketer Ian Chappell; and the former head of the Liberal Party,
Malcolm Turnbull. In 1993 other symbolic changes were enacted,
including the elimination of references to the queen in the citizenship
oath and the loss of voting rights for British citizens living in Australia.
When Paul Keating replaced Bob Hawke as the head of the Labor
Party and federal government, republicanism received an even greater
boost. It was Keating who moved to have references to the queen
removed from the citizenship oath, which succeeded, and to remove
the Union Jack from the corner of the Australian flag, which failed.
Keating also appointed a republican advisory committee, a group of
prominent republicans, including Malcolm Turnbull, who explored the
constitutional changes required to establish a republic. In 1995 Keating
gave a speech outlining the path toward constitutional change, which
began, “It is the Government’s view that Australia’s Head of State should
be an Australian and that Australia should become a republic by the
year 2001” (Keating 1995). As was the case with several other initia-
tives begun under Labor in these years, the election of a Liberal govern-
ment in 1996 stalled the republican movement. The issue has not died,
however, and there is much speculation that the reelection of a Labor
government in 2007 may lead to a resurgence in republican activities.
Multiculturalism
While the turn toward Asia and greater Aboriginal rights were two
important issues that at least symbolically separated Labor from the
Liberal opposition during the Hawke and Keating years, from 1983 to
1996, multiculturalism more generally remained an issue about which
both political parties maintained a steady dialogue. Dialogue, however,
does not mean consensus. During this period, Labor maintained its
stance that multiculturalism was an appropriate agenda for governing
Australia. In 1987 the Hawke government established the Advisory
Council on Multicultural Affairs and the Office for Multicultural Affairs
to manage “the vision of multiculturalism as a national identity” (Lovell
2007, 8). This vision was even more clearly elucidated in 1989 in the
government’s National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia, prepared
by the Advisory Council. Before leaving power in 1996, Labor even
expanded the definition of multiculturalism to add sex (1984) and dis-
ability (1992) as protected categories against discrimination; racial dis-
crimination had been outlawed by the Whitlam government in 1975.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
212
Despite, or perhaps because of, Labor’s commitments to its tenets,
the opposition during this period gradually moved away from the
strong support for multiculturalism espoused by its leader, Malcolm
Fraser, just a few years earlier. Most people who followed this dialogue
concur that by 1988 “bipartisan agreement on multiculturalism [had]
ended” (Jupp 2007, 106). In June of that year John Howard, leader of
the Liberal Party, gave a speech to the party faithful in Western Australia
in which he questioned the basic tenets of multiculturalism as govern-
ment policy or agenda. In this and a host of other speeches, “he argued
that multiculturalism could not possibly be an ‘all-embracing national
cement’ for Australia” (cited in Lovell 2007, 12). In so doing, he “used
the public ambivalence towards multiculturalism strategically . . . to
‘shatter’ the cross-party consensus on the value of multiculturalism”
(cited in Lovell 2007, 12). At first, Howard lost his leadership position
in the Liberal Party, at least in part for his views on multiculturalism
(Jupp 2007, 107). Nevertheless, after another federal election loss in
1993, the Liberals reelected Howard, and his antimulticultural views
took hold throughout the party.
While 1988 was a watershed year in the debate on multiculturalism,
in which the political consensus between the two main parties was
broken, it was not the first time that multiculturalism had been under
fire. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s
there were increasing rumblings about “buying the ethnic vote”
and “pandering to the ethnic lobby.” . . . Ethnicity should not
be given priority over class according to those on the left, nor
over gender argued feminists. Aboriginal leaders had never
accepted that the special status of indigenous people could
be properly acknowledged by multiculturalism. (Galligan and
Roberts 2003, 9)
From the very beginning, when Whitlam’s minister for immigration Al
Grassby used the term, multiculturalism was little understood outside
the public service and often misrepresented as putting white, Anglo-
Celtic Australians at a disadvantage.
Perhaps the best starting date for the backlash against multicultural-
ism, however, is 1984, when the historian Geoffrey Blainey gave a talk
to the Rotary Club of Warrnambool, in far western Victoria, in which
he struck “a cautionary note” about immigration policy, which, he
feared, was creating a large number of resentful Australians (Macintyre
and Clark 2004, 73). Blainey’s remarks, at the end of a speech in which
he had spoken about immigration and multiculturalism only in posi-
213
CONTRADICTION AND CHANGE
tive terms, polarized Australia’s intellectual class. The Department of
History at the University of Melbourne, where Blainey taught and
served as the dean of the Faculty of Arts, was torn apart. Twenty-three
of its members “wrote to the press two months after the controversy
began to dissociate themselves from his views on immigration policy,”
and protesters disrupted Blainey a month later when he delivered an
address in Sydney (Macintyre and Clark 2004, 73). However, rather
than clarify his remarks and place them in the context of his wider
praise for immigration and multiculturalism, the maelstrom caused
Blainey to push his ideas even further. Macintyre and Clark argue that
“the misrepresentation of his views and the vehemence with which they
were condemned strengthened his resolution. Rather than let the media
tire of the dispute, he pursued it in articles, interviews, speeches, and
statements” (Macintyre and Clark 2004, 73). Indeed, the Australian
media covered Blainey and his immigration debate for about a year and
then moved, along with him, to other topics, including “Aboriginal
land rights, the environment, the monarchy, trade unions, [and] judicial
activism” (Macintyre and Clark 2004, 75). By then Blainey had left his
academic positions to become a full-time “controversialist” (Macintyre
and Clark 2004, 73), and as such he reached great prominence in the
years after Labor’s defeat in 1996.
Other Changes
While Labor was installing a new economic regime in Australia and the
Liberals were questioning the orthodoxy of multiculturalism, a number
of other changes were occurring throughout Australia to galvanize the
period as one of tremendous transformation.
In 1987 Queenslanders experienced one of their most important
changes as the country’s longest-serving premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen,
finally retired in the face of corruption charges. Bjelke-Petersen entered
Queensland’s state parliament in 1947 and was elected premier in
1968 as leader of the state’s National Party. During his extraordinary
40 years in state politics he “always seemed to have a problem with
the concept of conflict of interest” (Dempster 2005). As early as 1957
he used a ministerial colleague to gain permission to search for oil in
north central Queensland, and just three weeks after he became pre-
mier, two companies in which he held shares were given permission
to search for oil on the Great Barrier Reef (Dempster 2005). While
never convicted of bribery or corruption charges, Bjelke-Petersen was
implicated in several other high-profile cases in the 1980s and 1990s. In
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
214
1989 the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal found that Bjelke-Petersen
had blackmailed Alan Bond for $400,000, while a 1992 defamation trial
ruled that Bjelke-Petersen had taken bribes from the industrialist Leslie
Thiess “on a large scale and on many occasions” between 1981 and
1984 (Dempster 2005).
At the same time as he was using his political positions for economic
gain, Bjelke-Petersen maintained an iron grip on most aspects of public
life in Queensland, from the parliament to the police force (Dempster
2005). The Fitzgerald Report, which eventually brought the massive
police corruption in the state to light and resulted in Bjelke-Petersen’s
retirement, highlighted the connections among the state’s government,
police force, prostitution, gambling, and organized crime. Bjelke-
Petersen himself was charged with perjury after giving evidence to
Fitzgerald, but, with the lone dissent of a Young National Party member
on the jury, he was acquitted with a hung jury.
Despite these obvious weaknesses, Bjelke-Petersen’s combination
of social conservatism and laissez-faire economics remained popular
in Queensland almost to the end of his political career. His stance on
issues ranging from abortion to native title was that of the ultracon-
servative Right and provided little to no room for compromise. For
example, in speaking out against the Hawke government’s commitment
to native title rights, Bjelke-Petersen blamed “ ‘gays,’ ‘heathens,’ unions,
and ‘forces of the Left including communists, the World Council of
Churches and other forces for revolution’ ” (cited in Whittaker 1994,
323). For many voters in far north Queensland at the time, Bjelke-
Petersen was speaking common sense. In addition, Queensland’s
economy during this period grew immensely. Bjelke-Petersen elimi-
nated Queensland’s inheritance tax and thus attracted retired people
from all over the country to the state’s booming new high-rise develop-
ments on the Sunshine and Gold Coasts, north and south of Brisbane,
respectively. Environmental issues were all but ignored, as were claims
for heritage listed buildings, in order to move forward on the building
of new airports, ports, electricity stations, coal mines, dams, freeways,
and buildings (Australian Politics Books 2009a). As a result, Bjelke-
Petersen is not entirely reviled today and remains in the minds of many
Queenslanders their greatest politician to date.
While Queenslanders were freeing themselves from the corrupt gov-
ernment of Bjelke-Petersen, Western Australians saw the ascendance
and downfall of the first female premier in Australian history. In 1990
Western Australia’s premier, Peter Dowding, stepped down from his
215
CONTRADICTION AND CHANGE
position as a result of a financing scandal and his party elected Dr.
Carmen Lawrence to replace him. She had been in the state parliament
for four years and had served as both minister for education and min-
ister for Aboriginal affairs. Upon taking over from Dowding, Lawrence
not only became premier but also held the portfolios of treasurer and
minister for Aboriginal affairs, public sector management, women’s
interests, family, and multicultural and ethnic affairs. Rather than for
this overwhelming workload, however, Lawrence’s brief three-year
period at the helm of Western Australia is best known for the “Easton
affair.” In 1992 Penny Easton committed suicide after documents relat-
ing to her divorce from the public servant Brian Easton were read aloud
in the state parliament. In the documents Brian claimed that the Liberal
opposition leader Richard Court had illegally provided Penny with
information that would damage him in their divorce settlement. After
winning the 1993 election, in 1995 Premier Richard Court established
a AU$7 million royal commission to explore whether or not Lawrence
had been aware of the plan to release the private divorce papers in the
parliament and thus was culpable in Penny Easton’s suicide. The com-
mission concluded that Lawrence had been aware of the plan and had
lied to them about that knowledge; the result was her trial for perjury
two years later. Despite the testimony of several other cabinet members,
Lawrence was acquitted of all charges in that trial and moved on to a
position in the federal Parliament. Nonetheless, most commentators
agree that the “Easton affair” damaged Lawrence’s once-bright political
career and eliminated her chances of becoming Australia’s first female
prime minister.
In addition to Carmen Lawrence, other Australian women were mak-
ing history in the 1983–96 period. Bob Hawke appointed Susan Ryan
minister for education in 1983, the first woman to serve at ministerial
level in a Labor government, and in 1986 Joan Child was elected as the
first and so far only woman Speaker of the House of Representatives.
The following year Mary Gaudron became the first woman justice on
the High Court and Macquarie University named Di Yerbury the first
female vice chancellor of an Australian university. Women graduated
as pilots in the Royal Australian Air Force for the first time in 1988
and took up some combat positions in the Australian Defense Force in
1992 (Summers 2002, 559–561). In 1990 voters in the state of Victoria
elected their first female premier, Joan Kirner of the Labor Party, who
served for slightly more than two years before a swing to the Right
delivered the government to Jeff Kennett and the Liberals.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
216
Conclusion
After living through 13 years of contradiction and change under the
Labor government, in March 1996 the Australian people rejected a
sixth term for Labor and elected the Liberal–National Party coalition
led by John Winston Howard. This was largely a personal rejection of
Paul Keating, who had been experiencing “hysterical and vituperative”
gLoria Joan LiLes ChiLd
J
oan Child was a pioneering Australian woman on two fronts. In
1974 she became the first woman to sit in federal Parliament for
the Labor Party when she won the Melbourne seat of Henty. Just
one year later when Malcolm Fraser swept into power, she lost her
seat, but the tenacious Child was reelected in 1980. After serving in a
number of important parliamentary and committee positions, includ-
ing as deputy Speaker from 1984 to 1986 and chair of the House of
Representatives Standing Committee in 1986, Child became the first
(and so far, only) woman elected by her peers to serve as Speaker of
the House. She served in that role for three years, including the period
when Parliament moved into its new home in Canberra. In 1989 Child
retired from her position as Speaker and one year later, at the age of
69, retired from politics entirely when her electorate was eliminated
in an electoral redistribution. In the year after her retirement, Child’s
political accomplishments were celebrated with her appointment as
an Officer of the Order of Australia, the second-highest award within
the Order of Australia system.
Child’s life before entering into parliamentary politics was a com-
bination of domestic necessity and local political action. Widowed
at a young age, she was left to raise her five sons on her own, often
cleaning houses in order to make ends meet. In the late 1960s and
early 1970s she became politicized in the wake of the Vietnam War.
She joined the Draft Resisters’ Union (DRU) and worked to shield
resisters from prosecution and put an end to national service. Her
experience with the DRU led to a career-long interest in the Vietnam
War, including working for restitution for soldiers exposed to Agent
Orange while serving in Southeast Asia. Her DRU experience also
contributed to Child’s decision to stand for Parliament in the historic
1972 election that delivered the government to Gough Whitlam and
the Labor Party for the first time since World War II. In this first run
Child lost by just 300 votes.
217
CONTRADICTION AND CHANGE
attacks from the opposition for most of his years in power (Clarke
2003, 355). By the end, however, Keating’s love of Italian suits, French
clocks, and classical music was repeatedly used to depict him as elitist
and un-Australian, while his counterattacks on the opposition as “old-
fashioned and backward-looking” were further evidence of his “unduly
combative” nature (Clarke 2003, 356). The fact that the unemployment
rate was about the same in 1996 as it had been in 1983 when Labor
was first elected, 9 percent, and the national debt had increased from
28 percent to 59 percent of national income likewise contributed to the
Liberal argument that it was time for a change (cited in Jones 2004).
A large number of former Labor voters “who had been left behind by
the pace of change and had become frightened and resentful,” a cohort
labeled “Howard’s Battlers” by the media (Clarke 2003, 359), delivered
a large majority to the coalition.
218
10
the howard years
(1996–2007)
t
he Howard years were in many ways the logical extension of the
changes begun during the previous 13 years of Labor government.
Free markets and free trade remained bipartisan causes, while the
unleashing of reactionary social policies to stoke the fear in Howard’s
battlers kept the coalition, and John Howard in particular, in power,
despite the breaking of numerous Liberal campaign promises. The ironic
nickname “Honest John,” which Howard had earned during his time
as Malcolm Fraser’s treasurer, was revived in this period with Howard’s
differentiation between “core” and “noncore” promises, the latter being
lies told in order to win elections (Clarke 2003, 359). One such noncore
promise was the election pledge in 1996 that he would “never, ever”
revive the question of a goods and service tax (GST), which the Liberal
candidate John Hewson had campaigned for in 1993 and lost, thus
delivering Paul Keating the unwinnable election. By 1997 a GST was on
Howard’s agenda and in July 2000 the new tax system took effect.
Fear and Loathing in Australia
When Paul Keating adopted the free market policies of the Liberal
Party and essentially made the two parties identical in their underly-
ing economic ideology, the Liberals had to find some issue on which
to fight electoral battles. With one important exception, gun control,
the direction in which Howard took his party and government ideol-
ogy was backward, what has been called “Howard’s ‘1950s throwback’ ”
(cited in Singleton 2005, 5). Rather than embracing the new relation-
ships Labor had developed in Asia, taking responsibility for centuries of
Aboriginal dislocation, and recognizing the vast diversity in multicul-
tural Australia, “the party he led looked back to the Menzies’ era for its
ideological underpinnings and its social policies” (Clarke 2003, 358).
219
THE HOWARD YEARS
Immigrants, Muslims, and Aboriginal people, in particular, were used
as scapegoats for the economic and social changes that were the natural
outcomes of the laissez-faire economics both parties had embraced.
Pauline Hanson
Even prior to the 1996 election, multiculturalism, immigrants, and
Aboriginal people had been under fire in some corners of the Liberal
Party. It was 1988 when John Howard first expressed his desire to roll
back the clock on multiculturalism. In early 1996 Pauline Hanson, a
fish-and-chips shop owner and little known Liberal Party candidate
from the city of Ipswich, Queensland, gained prominence with the pub-
lication of a letter to a newspaper railing against government assistance
to Aboriginal people. Two weeks prior to the 1996 election she was
dropped by the Liberals for this but startled many Australians when she
went on to win the election quite handily as an independent. Hanson
used her brief time in Parliament to speak about a variety of populist
issues, from Aboriginal affairs and multiculturalism to immigration
Pauline Hanson, seen here delivering her maiden speech in the House of Representatives in
1996, is one of Australia’s most controversial politicians of the late 20th century.
(©Newspix/
News Ltd/3rd Party Managed Reproduction & Supply Rights)