Tag Archives: ALP
How Paul Keating transformed the economy and the nation
Carol Johnson, University of Adelaide
The Conversation is running a series of explainers on key figures in Australian political history, examining how they changed the country and political debate. You can read the rest of the series here.
Paul Keating was one of Australia’s most charismatic and controversial prime ministers.
Born in Bankstown, New South Wales, into an Irish-Catholic, working-class and Labor-voting family, he left school before he turned 15. Keating joined the Labor Party as a teenager, quickly honing the political skills that would serve him so well in later life. He entered parliament as MP for Blaxland in 1969 at just 25 years old, and briefly served as minister for Northern Australia in the ill-fated Whitlam government.
He subsequently served as a very high-profile treasurer in the Hawke government from 1983-1991, before defeating Bob Hawke in a leadership ballot in December 1991. In doing so Keating became Australia’s 24th prime minister, serving until John Howard defeated him in the 1996 election.
To Keating’s supporters, he is a visionary figure whose “big picture” ideas helped transform the Australian economy, while still pursuing socially inclusive policies. To his conservative critics, Keating left a legacy of government debt and rejected “mainstream” Australians in favour of politically correct “special interests”.
He was a skilled parliamentary performer, renowned for his excoriating put-downs and wit.
Keating played a major role in transforming Australian political debate. He highlighted the role of markets in restructuring the economy, engagement with Asia, Australian national identity and the economic benefits of social inclusion.
Economic rationalism
Keating is remembered most for his eloquent advocacy of so-called “economic rationalism” both as treasurer and later as prime minister.
Under Hawke and Keating, Labor advocated free markets, globalisation, deregulation and privatisation, albeit in a less extreme form than the Liberals advocated. For example, while Labor introduced major public sector cuts, it attempted to use means tests to target the cuts and protect those most in need. Nonetheless, Hawke and Keating embraced the market far more than previous Labor leaders had.
Along with New Zealand Labour, Australian Labor became one of the international pioneers of a rapprochement between social democracy and a watered-down form of free-market neoliberalism. Years later, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had visited Australia during the Hawke and Keating years, was to acknowledge the influence of Australian Labor on his own “Third Way” approach to politics.
AAP/National Archives of Australia
Keating justified his economic rationalism on the grounds that the Australian economy needed to transform to be internationally competitive in a changing world. To avoid becoming one of the world’s “economic museums” or “banana republics”, in Keating’s view, there was no alternative but to embrace his economic rationalist agenda.
Trade unions and the ‘social wage’
At the same time, Keating argued that his economic policies would avoid social injustices. This contrasted with the outcomes of the extreme economic rationalism of the Thatcher and Reagan governments.
Unlike in the UK or US, where anti-union policies were pursued, the Labor government was prepared to work with the trade union movement to introduce its economic policies. Under the Accord agreements, trade unions agreed to wage restraint, and eventually real wage cuts, in return for government services and benefits.
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Australian politics explainer: the Prices and Incomes Accord
Hawke and Keating referred to this as the “social wage”. They claimed the resulting increased business profits would encourage economic growth and rising standards of living.
Social inclusion and economic growth
Keating saw his economic policies and progressive social policies as compatible. Increased social inclusion would contribute to economic growth.
Drawing on Hawke-era affirmative action legislation, Keating argued improved gender equality would mean women could contribute their skills to the economy.
Keating was also a passionate advocate for reconciliation with Indigenous Australians, including acknowledging the injustices of Australia’s colonial past and facilitating Native Title. He envisaged an Australia where Indigenous people would benefit from sustainable economic development, cultural tourism and could sell their artworks to the world.
National identity, Asia and the republic
In Keating’s ideal vision, Australia would engage more with Asia and benefit from the geo-economic changes occurring in the Asia-Pacific region.
Then Opposition Leader John Howard accused Keating of rejecting Australia’s British heritage. In fact, Keating acknowledged many positive British influences on Australian society. However, he argued that Australia had developed its own democratic innovations such as the secret ballot long before Britain accepted these. He also suggested Australian values had become more inclusive as a result of diverse waves of immigration.
Consequently, it was time for Australia to throw off its colonial heritage, including the British monarchy, and become a republic. Keating believed that doing so would enable Australia to be more easily accepted as an independent nation in the Asian region. He established a Republic Advisory Committee as part of preparations for a referendum on becoming a republic.
Keating’s legacy
Australia’s greater relationship with Asia has had major benefits for the economy, although Keating underestimated the downsides of increased competition. Recently, he complained about what he sees as excessive security fears in relation to China and their impact on Asian engagement. The republic remains unfinished business.
Keating’s vision has also left some unintended consequences for Labor today. Despite his patchy record in achieving them, Keating argued that both tax cuts and budget surpluses were important, even at the expense of public sector cuts.
Read more:
Vale Bob Hawke, a giant of Australian political and industrial history
Consequently, it became harder for Labor leaders to make a case for deficit-funded stimulus packages when needed (as Kevin Rudd tried to do during the Global Financial Crisis). Similarly, it became harder for Labor leaders to argue for increased taxes to fund a bigger role for government, as Bill Shorten attempted during the 2019 election.
In addition, as I argue in a recent book, Keating-era policy contributed in the longer term to poorer wages and conditions for workers. Labor is predictably loath to acknowledge this. Keating also underestimated the detrimental impacts of economic rationalism on other vulnerable groups in the community.
The 2019 election result suggests many Australians no longer believe Labor governments will improve their standards of living.
Rather than the prosperous brave new world he envisaged, parts of the Keating legacy may have made things harder for subsequent Labor leaders. Nonetheless, Keating remains a revered figure in the Labor Party and one of its most memorable leaders.
Carol Johnson, Emerita Professor, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Adelaide
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
High Court ruling on ‘Palace letters’ case paves way to learn more about The Dismissal – and our Constitution
National Archives of Australia
Anne Twomey, University of Sydney
The High Court has ruled that Sir John Kerr’s correspondence with the queen comprises “Commonwealth records”. This means access to them is now in Australian hands and can no longer be vetoed by the private secretary to the queen.
This correspondence, which includes Kerr’s briefings to the queen on the political crisis prior to the dismissal of the Whitlam government on November 11 1975, and his explanation to her afterwards of why he exercised this power, have so far been kept from public view.
Read more:
Explainer: what is the ‘palace letters’ case and what will the High Court consider?
The High Court’s decision opens the possibility that we will finally see the last pieces of factual evidence about The Dismissal – revealing the concerns and reasoning of the governor-general, as events occurred, without the gloss of hindsight.
It could even allow this festering wound in our political history to be healed, once all the information has been revealed. But it depends now on what the National Archives does next.
How were these letters treated until now?
Until now, the National Archives has claimed all correspondence it holds between governors-general and the queen, even when written in their official capacities, is “personal” and not a “Commonwealth record”.
This means there was no legal obligation on the National Archives to provide public access to these letters. Instead, the National Archives had stated it could only release these documents in accordance with the conditions placed on them by the person who lodged them with the National Archives.
But it let those conditions be changed on the instructions of the queen in 1991 so that her private secretary and the secretary of the governor-general held a veto over the release of any such correspondence.
Read more:
Australian politics explainer: Gough Whitlam’s dismissal as prime minister
AAP/James Ross
In the case brought by academic Jenny Hocking against the National Archives, the High Court held by a majority of six to one that the letters between Sir John Kerr and the queen were created, received and held as institutional documents by the “official establishment of the Governor-General” before being transferred to the National Archives by the official secretary to the governor-general in his official capacity. This level of official control over them was enough to make them “Commonwealth records”, even if the governor-general still held ownership rights over them (which the majority said it did not need to decide).
In their joint judgment, Chief Justice Kiefel and Justices Bell, Gageler and Keane said they could not see how the correspondence could be described, however “loosely”, as “private or personal records of the Governor-General”.
They said it could not be supposed that Kerr could have taken the correspondence from the governor-general’s official establishment and destroyed or sold it.
Justice Gordon thought even if Kerr did have property rights in the original documents, he gave up any claim to them when they were deposited with the National Archives. Justice Edelman agreed the correspondence between the governor-general and the queen was “created or received officially and kept institutionally”.
Only Justice Nettle concluded these letters were personal communications between Kerr and the Queen, and were not Commonwealth records.
Does this mean we get to see the letters now?
The court did not order that the letters be publicly released. Instead, it ordered the director-general of the National Archives reconsider Jenny Hocking’s request for access to the correspondence held by the archives, treating them as Commonwealth records.
Section 31 of the Archives Act 1983 requires the National Archives to give public access to any Commonwealth record that it holds that is within the open access period and is not an “exempt record”.
The correspondence between Kerr and the queen has been in the “open access period” since 2006/2007. The only question that remains is whether the director-general will now claim that the correspondence is comprised of “exempt records”.
Section 33 of the Act lists a number of exemptions. These include documents that could reasonably be expected to cause damage to international relations, or where disclosure of matters in the record would constitute a breach of confidence.
The damage that might be caused by the release of documents necessarily diminishes over time. So even if these exemptions are claimed, consideration would have to be given to whether they remain applicable, given the age of the documents.
The director-general of the National Archives responded to the High Court’s decision by stating the
“National Archives is a pro-disclosure organisation” that operates on the basis of making records publicly available “unless there is a specific and compelling need to withhold it”.
It will be interesting to see what “compelling” needs it might identify.
Are there any wider implications of the decision?
The High Court’s decision will also affect the release of correspondence by other governors-general. The release of Lord Casey’s correspondence with the Queen was recently blocked by Buckingham Palace, which stated it would refuse access to any correspondence with the queen until at least five years after her death, and then only if the private secretary to the new monarch agrees. That veto has now been destroyed by the High Court.
So not only is Kerr’s correspondence with the queen liable to be opened, but also the correspondence by all other governors-general with the queen, when it is in the “open access period” and subject to any exemption.
That may mean we get a better idea of how the roles of the governor-general and the queen operate under our Constitution, which would be a good thing.
Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Issues that swung elections: the dramatic and inglorious fall of Joh Bjelke-Petersen
Queensland Newspapers Pty Ltd/Wikimedia Commons
Shirleene Robinson, Macquarie University
With taxes, health care and climate change emerging as key issues in the upcoming federal election, we’re running a series this week looking at the main issues that swung elections in the past, from agricultural workers’ wages to the Vietnam War. Read other stories in the series here.
Johannes (Joh) Bjelke-Petersen’s reign as Queensland’s premier began in 1968 and came to a dramatic and inglorious end 19 years later with the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption. He is still Queensland’s longest-serving premier, but he leaves a complicated legacy. For many, he is remembered most for his rigid control of over all areas of government and his anti-democratic stance on public protests.
Bjelke-Petersen governed the state as leader of the Country Party (which later became the National Party) until his downfall in 1987.
In May that year, the ABC television programme Four Corners aired the first public allegations of organised crime and police corruption in Queensland. Bjelke-Petersen would hang on to office for only a few more months before being forced to step down.
The Fitzgerald Inquiry, launched in the aftermath of the Four Corners programme, continued for another two years, uncovering a deep and systematic web of corruption that implicated many at the highest levels of Queensland government and the Queensland Police Force.
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The man who would be commissioner: Bjelke-Petersen’s crooked pick
For Bjelke-Petersen, not only was his career as a state premier over, but so, too, were his national ambitions. In early 1987, Bjelke-Petersen had launched an ill-fated “Joh for PM” campaign in a brazen attempt to challenge then-Liberal Party leader John Howard as head of the Coalition, then run against Prime Minister Bob Hawke in that year’s federal election.
His bid for power split the federal Coalition. Capitalising on the internal dissent of the Opposition, Hawke easily won the 1987 election, holding onto the prime-ministership for another four years.
An ill-fated run for federal office
Hawke’s win in the 1987 election had been far from inevitable. The Coalition had actually been ahead in the polls for much of Hawke’s 1984-1987 term. However, internal divisions, typified by the rivalry between Howard and Andrew Peacock over the Liberal leadership, put pressure on the party. Tensions were further stoked when Bjelke-Petersen announced his intention to enter the federal arena.
In January 1987, when Bjelke-Petersen announced that he intended to run for parliament, he assumed that his success in Queensland could be duplicated at the federal level. Fresh from a win in the state election the previous year, he and his backers did not acknowledge the distinctive set of circumstances in Queensland that had given rise to his long time in office.
His bid for PM did make a brief splash in the national media, drawing further attention to the deep ideological rifts within the federal Coalition. Howard, leader of the Liberals, and Ian Sinclair, leader of the Nationals, struggled to contain the division caused by Bjelke-Petersen’s ambitions. The discord reached a breaking point at the end of February 1987, when the Queensland National Party decided to withdraw its 12 federal MPs from the Coalition in support of Bjelke-Petersen’s efforts. The Coalition formally split soon after.
Hawke seized on the Coalition’s infighting and quickly called an election on May 27. Bjelke-Petersen was not even in the country at the time, having gone to the United States. Outplayed and dealing with increased coverage of corruption and dissent in Queensland, Bjelke-Petersen swiftly abandoned his plan to run for prime minister.
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The larrikin as leader: how Bob Hawke came to be one of the best (and luckiest) prime ministers
By the end of the year, Howard’s Coalition was fatally divided. Labor was returned to government and increased its majority in the House with 86 seats to 43 for the Liberals and 19 for the National Party.
The win allowed Hawke to take his place in history as the party’s longest-serving prime minister.
Wikimedia Commons/John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland/ Queensland Newspapers Pty. Ltd.
A tarnished legacy in Queensland
The failings of the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland extended far beyond the arrogance that saw him attempt an ill-conceived move into federal politics.
Under his leadership, Queensland was not democratic. His government exploited the state’s electoral gerrymander, which over-represented rural electorates at the expense of urban ones. The state’s unicameral parliament meant the checks and balances a second house would have provided were absent.
Bjelke-Petersen also relied on a police force rife with corruption to prop up his government. Dissenters faced brutalisation at the hands of police when they took to the streets. A repressive set of laws that banned protests meant taking to the streets could result in time in prison. For too long, the media were silent about the corruption taking place in the state.
Read more:
Jacks and Jokers: Bjelke-Petersen and Queensland’s ‘police state’
Journalist Evan Whitton called Bjelke-Petersen “the hillbilly dictator” in reference to his carefully cultivated parochial style of leadership. Yet, Bjelke-Petersen was guided by a shrewd political awareness. He styled himself as a defender of a unique Queensland sensibility and scorned the more progressive southern states. He was not opposed to using fear and prejudice for electoral gain.
His treatment of LGBTIQ issues provides one strong example. During the 1980s, the Bjelke-Petersen government made efforts to prevent gay and lesbian teachers from being employed and gay students from forming support groups. When the AIDS epidemic reached Australia, his government demonised LGBTIQ individuals. As most other Australian states decriminalised sex acts between men, Bjelke-Petersen’s government attempted to introduce anti-gay licensing laws and criminalise lesbianism. In 1986, the Sturgess Inquiry into Sexual Offences Involving Children and Related Matters was used by the government to further ostracise gays and lesbians and turn the public against them.
The Bjelke-Petersen era provides a cautionary tale. It is difficult to imagine any other premier maintaining his or her position for this long again. His ill-fated bid for federal politics also reveals the impact that egomaniacal and divisive figures can have on political parties.
Bjelke-Petersen may not have been the only factor behind Hawke’s 1987 win, but his intervention certainly did Howard no favours – and deepened a rift in the Coalition that took years to mend.
Shirleene Robinson, Associate Professor and Vice Chancellor’s Innovation Fellow, Macquarie University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Issues that swung elections: rural voters get a voice and topple a government in 1913
Queensland State Archives, Digital Image ID 3057
Peter Woodley, Australian National University
With taxes, health care and climate change emerging as key issues in the upcoming federal election, we’re running a series this week looking at the main issues that swung elections in the past, from agricultural workers’ wages to the Vietnam War. Read other stories in the series here.
One of the forthcoming federal election’s many questions is how rural Australians will vote. On issues such as climate change, coal seam gas extraction, water management and basic decency in politics, voters in regional Australia are disillusioned. The old certainties of rural politics seem to be breaking down, and there is a heightened sense that the long-established structures amplifying country voices are no longer working.
More than a century ago, rural Australia was in a similar state of flux over how farmers should engage with state and federal politics. The 1913 federal election was a pivotal moment in the contest of ideas about what sort of polity and society rural Australians wanted. The alliances that emerged from the election led to the formation of the Country Party, the precursor to today’s National Party.
The 1913 election was called by the Labor prime minister, Andrew Fisher, a former coal miner and avid trade unionist. Fisher first served as PM in 1908-09, leading a minority government. When he attained a comfortable majority in both houses of the parliament at the 1910 election, he initiated an ambitious reform program that included liberalising disability and old age pensions, introducing maternity allowances and workers’ compensation, and enacting a progressive land tax on the unimproved value of the largest rural properties.
It was a considerable record on which to seek another term of government, but also contained elements that would galvanise resistance in rural Australia.
State Library of South Australia (PRG 280/1/3/289)
Developments in rural Australia
At the time, the New South Wales Farmers and Settlers Association (FSA) was emerging as a powerful and effective voice, claiming to represent farmers, both large and small. By 1914, it would boast 430 branches across the state.
The FSA executive opposed any form of land tax, even on the largest landholders, on suspicion that a Labor government would one day impose it on all farmers. However, farmers still struggling to acquire a “living area” were sympathetic to the Labor Party’s agenda, as many were once shearers or rural labourers.
When a resolution was proposed at the FSA conference in 1907 that would bar members of the Labor Party from joining the organisation, a Jerilderie delegate objected that such a motion would “cause disastrous splits in families the members of which included supporters of both organisations”. During that same period, senior members of the FSA executive resigned rather than renounce Labor sympathies.
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Issues that swung elections: the ‘credit squeeze’ that nearly swept Menzies from power in 1961
By 1913, another issue had intensified the FSA executive’s antagonism towards Labor: the increasingly active Rural Workers Union (RWU).
The conservative government of George Reid, which held power in Australia from August 1904 to July 1905, had excluded large numbers of rural labourers from the federal Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1904, arguing that the seasonal and unstructured nature of agricultural work made formal schedules of pay and conditions impractical.
The Labor Party contested this view, and in 1910, Fisher’s government amended the act to include rural workers. The RWU then sought registration with the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration as a first step towards achieving an industrial award mandating minimum wages and conditions of employment.
Then, in early 1913, the RWU began negotiating with the powerful Australian Workers Union, which represented shearers and shearing shed hands, with the aim of amalgamating into one big rural union.
This provoked significant disquiet in FSA branches. The FSA executive, led by the articulate and politically astute farmer Robert Patten, redoubled its efforts to energise and expand its membership among small-scale farmers and their families, encouraging them to align themselves firmly on the side of capital.
The 1913 election
In the midst of these developments, Fisher called an election for the middle of 1913. He was opposed by Joseph Cook who, like Fisher, was a British migrant with a coal mining background.
Cook entered the new federal parliament in 1901, and by 1909, had become deputy leader in Alfred Deakin’s Commonwealth Liberal Party – a new, anti-Labor coalition, or “fusion,” of members formerly associated with Free Trade and Protectonist alliances. (It was also a predecessor of the modern Liberal Party.) Cook then became leader of the opposition when Deakin resigned in January 1913.
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Cultivating a nation: why the mythos of the Australian farmer is problematic
Fisher presented six referendum questions to the electorate to coincide with the 1913 election. Each was designed to extend Commonwealth powers in light of the High Court’s unsympathetic rulings on aspects of his reform agenda. All six proposals were rejected by a slim margin – a sign the electorate was perhaps wary of the pace and breadth of Fisher’s reform agenda.
In the election itself, the country vote would prove to be crucial.
Like the referendums, the House of Representatives election was tight. The main parties were separated by only 9,000 of the 1.85 million total votes cast.
Labor entered the election holding nine more seats than the opposition, picking up seats in the big cities and Victorian regional centres of Bendigo and Ballarat. But in rural areas, the Liberal Party prevailed, picking up four Labor seats alone in Victoria.
In New South Wales, the FSA endorsed supporters of its platform running as opposition candidates in seven seats. Four of them deposed sitting Labor Party members, including Patten, who defeated the pro-Labor independent William Lyne in Hume. It was the last seat declared, and Cook won government with a majority of one.
But Cook’s victory was short-lived. By the time he had selected a speaker, his majority had disappeared, and Australians would be back at the polls by mid-1914, just as war broke out in Europe.
The election would have a longer-lasting legacy with the organisation of rural voters into a sizeable – and powerful – voting bloc with a dedicated, conservative presence in federal politics. The Country Party emerged as an independent and distinctly rural voice during the war and held the federal balance of power by 1922.
Australia’s population was already drifting to the cities when the Country Party formed, but that has not prevented the rural vote from continuing to exert a strong, often disproportionate, influence on Australian politics.
As in 1913, the 2019 election could prove to be a decisive moment in shifting rural political alliances, with broader consequences.
Peter Woodley, PhD candidate, School of History, Australian National University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Issues that swung elections: Labor’s anti-war message falls flat in landslide loss in 1966
State Library of New South Wales/Wikimedia Commons
Jon Piccini, Australian Catholic University
With taxes, health care and climate change emerging as key issues in the upcoming federal election, we’re running a series this week looking at the main issues that swung elections in the past, from agricultural workers’ wages to the Vietnam War. Read other stories in the series here.
As far as 1960s policy issues go, none were bigger than the Vietnam War. Images of helicopter gunships and long-haired protesters overlaid with rock music are the era’s stock footage. But, was it ever a major election issue in Australia?
In November 1966, an Australian Labor Party that had been in opposition for 17 years finally saw victory within its grasp. And the party’s ageing leader, Arthur Calwell, focused on the war as Labor’s main point of difference with a seemingly divided, aimless government.
Organisations like the Australian Peace Council, Save our Sons and the Youth Campaign Against Conscription pushed hard for a Labor victory. But, in the end, Prime Minister Harold Holt not only won the contest, his Liberal-Country Coalition actually gained 10 seats, leaving Labor to lick its wounds.
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Student protests won’t be the last, and they certainly weren’t the first
Australia’s involvement in the war
Department of Defence/ AAP
Australia’s involvement in Vietnam began in 1962. What started as a 30-person training deployment quickly grew to a battalion after then-Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced – inaccurately at the time – that South Vietnam had requested further assistance in its defence against the North Vietnamese-backed communist insurgents in April 1965.
This was a strategy of “forward defence” that marked Menzies’ policy towards Asia, which was widely supported by the Australian electorate as a way to stop the spread of communism across Southeast Asia. This strategy mirrored fears of a “domino theory” that would bring communism to Australia’s shores.
However, conscription was not as popular as the war among Australians. Polling in October 1966 showed that the public opposed conscription for overseas service by about 60%. Calwell, who had been the Labor leader since 1960, knew this and made it the most important issue in the next election.
Menzies’ retirement in January gave Labor confidence going into the 1966 election. Holt was a relative unknown who barely differed from Menzies on policy. At the same time, Labor was modernising its platforms by doing away with things like support for the “White Australia” policy.
Also, an October 1966 visit from US President Lyndon B. Johnson, which Holt hoped would buoy his chances, was marred by anti-war protests that were broadcast around the world.
Labor’s failed conscription tactic
Wikimedia Commons
Yet, if anything, the focus on conscription showed not Labor’s revival but its continued stagnation. During the first world war, Calwell had been involved in the defeat of conscription in two national referendums in 1916 and 1917. Fifty years later, Labor hoped to use the timing of the anniversary of those defeats to its political advantage.
Speaking in April 1966, Calwell cautioned that conscription was a “sinister word” for Australians that would “split the nation and leave the same bitter memories as did the referendum campaigns of 50 years ago”. Then, in a campaign speech only days before the vote, Calwell condemned those who wished to plunge their “arthritic hands wrist deep in the blood of Australian youth”.
While not particularly innovative politically, Holt’s relative youth and seeming vigour – demonstrated by somewhat salacious photographs he took on the beach with his young daughters-in-law – seemed a breath of fresh air.
But this was just one of the reasons Calwell’s rhetoric fell flat. The audience for his messaging was also unclear. Australia was an increasingly youthful nation, but the voting age of 21 meant the “baby boom” generation had little electoral weight.
And while growing numbers of young people were protesting the war, they did so without reference to the first world war, but with theatrical protest tactics from overseas.
Legacies of the 1966 election
Australian War Memorial/ AAP
Holt’s unexpected landslide victory – winning twice as many seats as his opponent –proved politically explosive. While receiving little credit for the win, which most put down to Calwell’s ineptitude, Holt used his remaining year in parliament to cement an independent reputation through such initiatives as the May 1967 referendum on Indigenous rights.
His disappearance off Cheviot Beach in December of that year left an unfinished legacy.
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The photographer’s war: Vietnam through a lens
As for the antiwar movement, Labor’s election failure led to disenchantment and reorientation. Increasing numbers of young agitators saw the result as a sign of deep public apathy with the movement. This led to more provocative and controversial protests, such as the daubing of soldiers with fake blood during parades, raising money for the Viet Cong and rioting outside the US Consulate in Melbourne.
Labor largely went quiet on Vietnam after its defeat, only returning to the barricades in time for the Moratorium marches of May 1970, by which time public opinion had finally turned against the war. It has been said that the 1966 election’s most significant legacy was as
the last stand of a distinctive Labor style – impassioned, traditionalist [and] Irish-Catholic.
Calwell’s post-election position proved untenable and he was replaced by the deputy leader, Gough Whitlam, who would spend the next five years modernising a party many considered stuck in the past. In the end, Calwell’s overzealous commitment to wielding the past as a political weapon only fast tracked this process.
Jon Piccini, Lecturer, Australian Catholic University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The larrikin as leader: how Bob Hawke came to be one of the best (and luckiest) prime ministers
National Archives of Australia
Frank Bongiorno, Australian National University
The rise of Bob Hawke to the prime ministership now seems to have been so unstoppable, so inevitable, that it is hard to imagine Australian political history might have unfolded differently.
But what if, instead of entering the House of Representatives at the 1980 election, Hawke had retired from his leadership of the union movement into, say, a business career? What if he’d not had willpower to give up the booze? What if he’d lacked the inclination to tone down his image as a larrikin union leader?
In that event, we might perhaps recall Hawke as a gifted union leader – probably a bit of a “character” – but one who had lacked the personal discipline to fulfil his potential. Perhaps we would remember him as epitomising those olden days when mighty trade unions imagined they were a kind of fifth estate, and when their big bosses were giants whose power rivalled, and sometimes eclipsed, that of leading politicians and capitalists. Hawke might have justly been recalled as a symbol of the pride before the fall.
Instead, Hawke is recalled as one of our greatest prime ministers and certainly among the most influential. It is a strength of the ABC’s upcoming two-part documentary, Hawke: The Larrikin and the Leader, narrated by Richard Roxburgh, that it evokes the industrial world that gave Hawke both a long and rich apprenticeship in public life and a remarkable celebrity status. Some of the 1960s and 1970s footage is marvellous. You can almost smell the beer and Brylcreem.
Reuters/David Gray
But we are also reminded of the personal transformation that was needed before Hawke could be seriously considered for national political leadership. As the pollster Rod Cameron comments in the program, the public might have been willing to tolerate, while frowning on, a womanising prime minister, but they would not take a drunkard.
The larrikin side of the Hawke personality is now a popular favourite at events, where the octogenarian acquiesces to the urgings of an adoring public by sculling a beer – a reprise of his record-breaking student effort at Oxford. But the beer-swilling larrikin, who would still be there at closing time in the bar of Melbourne’s John Curtin Hotel, had to be placed in the shade in the 1980s.
The reformed larrikin, of course, is a familiar type in Australian culture, most famously embodied in Bill, the protagonist of C.J. Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. Bill gives up stoushing to become a properly domesticated husband and father, “Livin’ an’ lovin”. Hawke did a lot of both. The program’s discussion of his philandering is more coy than its handling of his drinking, but the expression on Hawke government minister Susan Ryan’s face when discussing Hawke’s relationship with women paints a thousand words.
The treatment of Hawke in this series is rather generous. Hawke was himself interviewed and all the talking heads clearly admire him to a greater or lesser extent – mainly greater. There are occasional hints of a darker side. Graham Richardson says he did some pretty appalling things under the influence of drink, but will not tell us what; only that Hawke would not have made it to the prime ministership in the age of the internet and the mobile phone.
Hawke’s 1971 Victorian Father of the Year award is treated ironically. The news footage has Hawke looking decidedly sheepish; the long-suffering Hazel privately wondered whether the judges had been on opium. Neal Blewett, a minister in Hawke’s government but a Bill Hayden supporter, thought Hawke and the party’s brutal treatment of Hayden on the eve of the 1983 election did long-term damage to the Labor Party’s morality.
The documentary does bring together many of the threads that help explain Hawke’s success as a politician. There was the sense of destiny, instilled in this Congregational minister’s son from childhood. His mother claimed that her Bible was forever marvellously opening at Isaiah 9:6: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder”.
We are reminded of Hawke’s love affair with the Australian people, the “almost mystical bond” with voters. During that golden period of about 18 months after the 1983 election – as the drought broke, the recession ended and Australia II triumphed in the America’s Cup – Hawke was lucky, but he also knew how to exploit the brightening national mood to the full. Hawke did not just ride the wave of national pride and optimism during what Jim Davidson has aptly called the “Age of the Winged Keel”. He embodied it.
For a time at least. The 1984 election, in which Labor lost ground, took off much of the shine. Then there was the “banana republic” crisis of 1986, but the documentary does not pause long over economic policy. It does recognise that Hawke was immensely lucky in the depth and breadth of talent in his ministries, but that he was also skilled in bringing out the best in those he worked with. His ego was colossal, but he had the wisdom to share power.
There would be more election victories – in 1987 and 1990 – but things were never the same once his relationship with his younger treasurer and natural successor, Paul Keating, degenerated into acrimony. Yet, to the very end, as his approval rating plunged during “the recession we had to have”, Hawke clung to the idea that his relationship with voters was special. Like so many others, he failed to grasp the opportunity to leave office on his own terms.
Hawke: The Larrikin and the Leader moves along rather breezily. The episodes in Hawke’s career that reveal his attachment to high moral principle, such as his hostility to racism, or those achievements that rhyme with the present preoccupations of progressive politics – environmental protection and Medicare – receive loving attention. Hawke’s failures are not ignored, but get more superficial treatment. An exception is the abandonment of national Aboriginal land rights legislation and the proposal for a treaty, which figures in a melancholy few minutes towards the end of the second episode. But Hawke always has good intentions.
This is a nostalgic program that begins by noting that Australians today “have never been so distrusting of politicians. But there was a time when things were different”. So, how did we get from there to here? On this question, Hawke: The Larrikin and the Leader is silent.
But it may be that for all of Hawke’s achievements, the era’s narrowing of political possibilities – the equation of economic efficiency with good government, and of national productivity and competitiveness with national achievement – planted the seeds of both later economic success and political decay.
Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Australian politics explainer: the Prices and Incomes Accord
National Archives of Australia
Anthony Forsyth, RMIT University and Carolyn Holbrook, Deakin University
The Conversation is running a series of explainers on key moments in Australian political history, looking at what happened, its impact then, and its relevance to politics today. 
During the Hawke-Keating years, the union movement – under the leadership of Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Bill Kelty – became a partner in Labor’s economic rationalist agenda.
Through Accord agreements, unions accepted a degree of responsibility for Australia’s broader economic health. This was often at the expense of their own members’ interests.
What happened?
The Hawke Labor government had a strong incentive to seek a new approach to industrial relations when it came to office.
The last time Labor held government was under Gough Whitlam, between 1972 and 1975. At that time, Hawke was ACTU president, and the front man for the industrial militancy and wages explosion that saw inflation peak at 18% and unemployment reach 5% for the first time since the early 1940s.
Hawke was a confrontational union leader. But Hawke 2.0, the self-possessed teetotaller who became prime minister in 1983, preferred consensus.
In opposition, Labor’s industrial relations spokesperson, Ralph Willis, developed the idea of a formalised agreement between the unions and Labor in government, which was adopted as policy at the Labor Party conference in 1979.
The Prices and Incomes Accord was a series of agreements between Labor and the ACTU where unions would moderate their wage demands in exchange for improvements in the “social wage”.
The first Accord was struck in February 1983, just before the election of the Hawke government. There were six subsequent accords, culminating in Accord Mark VII in October 1991, which ushered in the system of enterprise bargaining.
The Industrial Relations Commission developed a policy of “two-tier” wage fixation, in a shift from the “wage indexation” system of the past. Basic increases would be provided but additional wage rises were dependent on “efficiency offsets”.
By the early 1990s, this had developed into the dual system of basic annual wage increases for award-covered workers, and the opportunity to implement enterprise-based agreements to drive productivity at the workplace level.
The Accord’s social wage elements included better public health provision through Medicare, improvements to pensions and unemployment benefits, tax cuts, and – eventually – superannuation.
What was its impact?
The Accord was a key component of the Hawke-Keating governments’ economic reform program. Along with the floating of the Australian dollar, opening the door to international banks and the reduction of tariffs, the Accord signalled a turn toward a more globally engaged Australian economy.
Hawke’s consensus-oriented style brought the union movement inside the economic policy management tent. This was also a corporatist project: although business groups were not formally part of the Accord, Hawke brought big business into other institutions such as the Economic Planning Advisory Council.
Generally, business groups became critical of the influence the ACTU exerted over Labor through the Accord years. From the mid-1980s, arguments for radical reform of the industrial relations system grew stronger.
Elements in the Coalition and the New Right pushed for individual workplace bargaining and a reduction of union power. They saw the Accord as symbolic of the much-reviled “industrial relations club”.
Within the union movement itself, the Accord was always controversial. Critics argued it transferred power from the grassroots network of delegates and shop stewards to an elite group of senior officials sitting around the table with business and government.
The Accord evolved over the 1980s to focus mainly on managing wages outcomes while ignoring accompanying increases in the social wage. In response, left-wing officials like Laurie Carmichael of the Metalworkers Union became increasingly critical of the Accord. For many, the union movement had simply given up too much for too little.
What are its contemporary implications?
On the 30th anniversary of the Accord in 2013, ACTU president Ged Kearney said the Accord’s spirit should be revived to meet the challenges of job insecurity and wage inequality.
Rising inequality is behind the backlash now underway against neoliberalism and the mantra of prosperity through free trade and globalisation.
The ACTU’s new secretary, Sally McManus, has been in the headlines since assuming her position in March this year. McManus said she believed workers were justified in breaking laws that they judged to be unfair.
She later declared neoliberalism had “run its course”, and:
The Keating years created vast wealth for Australia, but it has not been shared, and too much has ended up in offshore bank accounts or in CEO’s back pockets.
McManus’ combative style recalls an era before market economics gained bipartisan support, when the lines between labour and capital were more sharply drawn. Her approach also raises important questions about the future of the relationship between the industrial and political wings of the Australian labour movement.
McManus appears to be positioning the union movement as the bulwark against unfairness, and the vigorous defender of long-held conditions. There is none of the Kelty “pinstriped proletarian” in her approach. It is unknown whether the McManus-led ACTU will entertain a similar kind of compact with a Shorten Labor government, or take a more conflict-oriented approach.
Bill Shorten is by nature a consensus Labor leader, who is inclined to seek common ground between business and labour. At present, though, he is riding the turn against neoliberalism, adopting a pro-union position and populist rhetoric on issues such as corporate tax cuts and penalty rates.
There is some prospect therefore of a new Labor-ACTU compact for the 2020s. This would not focus so much on the Accord’s economic objectives, but on the protection of workers’ rights in the fast-changing world of automation and new platforms of service delivery.
Anthony Forsyth, Professor of Workplace Law, RMIT University and Carolyn Holbrook, Alfred Deakin Research Fellow, Deakin University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Australian politics explainer: Gough Whitlam’s dismissal as prime minister
National Archives of Australia
Anne Twomey, University of Sydney
The Conversation is running a series of explainers on key moments in Australian political history, looking at what happened, its impact then, and its relevance to politics today. 
The dismissal of the Whitlam government provided one of the biggest political shocks in Australian history. It put on open display vice-regal powers that most did not know existed, and tested Australians’ understanding of their own Constitution and political system.
What happened?
On October 16, 1975, the Senate resolved that it would not pass supply until the Whitlam government agreed to call a general election. This meant the Commonwealth would soon run out of money to pay public servants, provide pensions, pay its contractors, and provide services. The Whitlam government decided to tough it out in the hope the Coalition opposition would collapse.
Because the Christmas holidays were approaching, the last day to initiate a pre-Christmas election was November 13, 1975. If that deadline was missed, there would potentially be months of economic chaos with no money to run the government and pay salaries or pensions until February.
On the morning of November 11, Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser told Gough Whitlam the Opposition would pass supply if Whitlam agreed to hold an election for both houses in May or June 1976. Whitlam refused.
Instead, Whitlam went to the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, to seek a half-Senate election in December. This would not have been likely to resolve the impasse, because any new Senate would not have taken office until July 1 the following year (apart from the territory senators).
When Whitlam declined to request a general election, Kerr exercised his reserve powers by dismissing Whitlam and his government from office. He then appointed Fraser as prime minister on the condition that he secure the passage of supply, advise the dissolution of both houses of parliament, and call an election in December.
Kerr also stipulated that Fraser’s government must only be a caretaker government that would not make any major appointments or undertake any inquiries or investigations into the Whitlam government. The Senate passed supply, and both houses were immediately dissolved.
It was then left to voters in the election to decide who should govern. The Whitlam government was comprehensively defeated, and the Fraser government was elected to office.
What was its impact?
The reaction was relief for some, and outrage for others. The public and the media, being unfamiliar with constitutional history and the role and powers of vice-regal representatives, saw the Dismissal as unprecedented and shocking.
A martyrdom narrative was constructed – that it was only ever Labor leaders who were dismissed (Whitlam and former NSW premier Jack Lang in 1932), and it was always done by the conservative establishment through undemocratic upper houses. Conspiracy theories flourished, with fingers being pointed at the CIA, the Queen, and the banks, amongst others.
That Kerr had sought advice from the High Court’s chief justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, albeit after Kerr had already made up his mind to dismiss Whitlam, was seen as adding to a conspiracy, because Barwick had previously been a Liberal minister.
Collective amnesia was applied to the fact that such things had happened before. Chief justices had advised governors-general and governors on almost every constitutional controversy since Federation.
Labor had blocked supply in state upper houses before, resulting in the governor, after consulting the chief justice, requiring the resignation of the conservative premier – even when he held a majority in the lower house. It had long been the case that if supply could not be obtained, the only options were resignation, an election, or dismissal (sometimes disguised as a forced resignation).
In 1975, the Speaker asked the Queen to intervene and restore the Whitlam government. In response, the Queen’s private secretary pointed out that the power to appoint and remove the prime minister and dissolve parliament was held by the governor-general, so she could not act.
Many people were influenced by the events of 1975 to support a republic, due to their objection to an unelected representative of the Queen dismissing an elected government that had majority support in the lower house.
Others saw 1975 as revealing the importance of the Senate’s power to block supply, and the need for the reserve powers of the governor-general to resolve a crisis.
All the major participants in the 1975 dismissal were damaged by it. Whitlam was never able to form a government again. Kerr was publicly vilified and led much of his later life outside Australia.
Although he became prime minister, Fraser found his government’s legitimacy undermined by the way it had obtained office, resulting in it being more timid and ineffective than it might otherwise have been.
National Archive of Australia
What are its contemporary implications?
One salutary consequence has been that both governments and oppositions have been more wary about taking matters to extremes, preferring to let conflicts be resolved in the ordinary course by elections.
The Dismissal soured politicians’ taste for brinkmanship. It revealed the likely consequence of a loss of political legitimacy.
Another somewhat ironic consequence is that while the Dismissal fuelled the republican movement, it has also undermined it. The republican model with most public support in Australia is that of a head of state directly elected by the people.
To avert the prospect of a directly elected head of state undermining the indirectly elected prime minister and destabilising the system of government, many consider it would be necessary to remove or codify the powers of the head of state. Yet the ghosts of 1975 have stymied attempts to do so, frustrating any consensus towards a republic.
Harking back to Whitlam’s famous words on the steps of Parliament House, nothing might have saved the governor-general – but the Dismissal appears to have saved the Queen, at least for now.
Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Sydney
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Australian politics explainer: the Labor Party split
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Paul Strangio, Monash University
The Conversation is running a series of explainers on key moments in Australian political history, looking at what happened, its impact then, and its relevance to politics today. 
The Labor split started in earnest in October 1954, when federal leader H.V. Evatt denounced the “disloyal” activities of a militant anti-communist faction operating predominantly in the party’s Victorian branch. Tumult followed.
In March 1955, rival Victorian Labor delegations competed for admission to the party’s federal conference in Hobart, further crystallising the split. A month later, the Victorian Labor government was sacrificed as anti-communist breakaways crossed the floor to support an opposition-initiated no-confidence motion.
In the federal sphere, Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies called an early poll to capitalise on Labor’s chaos. The result was an emphatic victory for the Coalition, which benefited from preferences from the Australia Labor Party (Anti-Communist), later renamed the Democratic Labor Party (DLP).
Influenced by distinctive local factors, the split also engulfed Queensland Labor in 1957. Premier Vince Gair was expelled from the party. This precipitated an election that delivered power to the Coalition in Queensland.
But the seeds of this political calamity predated Evatt’s combustible statement. For complex socioeconomic and other reasons, a majority of Irish Catholics had historically voted for Labor, and the schism during the first world war over conscription further strengthened this ethno-sectarian alignment. In turn, there had always been a tension between socialist impulses within the labour movement and Catholicism.
The risk of conflict escalated in the 1930s, as the small but resolute local Communist Party made inroads into the labour movement.
By the 1940s, communists controlled key trade unions. This prompted Labor state branch organisations to establish “industrial groups” to combat that influence. These groups proved effective, but became closely entwined – especially in Victoria – with the Catholic Social Studies Movement.
“The Movement” had been set up by the bishops and was directed by B. A. Santamaria to exploit the position of Catholics within the labour movement to fight atheistic communism.
Santamaria’s ambition for The Movement expanded from it stiffening anti-communist resolve in the trade unions to it becoming a trojan horse for transforming the Labor’s personnel and policies. Those dreams were fanciful, but Santamaria’s zealotry and Evatt’s intemperance were crucial to the split.
Trade union powerbrokers who were determined to subjugate Labor’s parliamentary wing – even at the price of political oblivion – were also responsible.
W. Brindle, CC BY
What was its impact?
The split destroyed Labor governments in Victoria and Queensland. The party was relegated to opposition for a generation. It did not regain office in these states until 1982 and 1989 respectively.
Better sense prevailed within the ALP’s top counsels and Catholic hierarchy elsewhere, enabling Labor governments to ride out the storm in New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia.
Federally, however, the consequences were also devastating for the ALP. Becoming prime minister for the second time in 1949, Menzies’ hold on office was initially far from secure; the elections of 1951 and 1954 were close run. But the Labor split gifted him political dominance.
In contrast, despite remaining at the ALP’s helm until 1960, the brilliant but mercurial Evatt never recovered politically or psychologically.
Another legacy was the DLP, which at its zenith held the balance of power in the Senate and buttressed non-Labor governments, federal and state, through watertight preference flows.
The split dramatically realigned Catholic voting. Tribal Labor supporters were torn between their religious and political faiths. The upward social mobility of Catholics in post-war Australia was destined to diversify their voting behaviour, but in one stroke a sizeable chunk hived off to the DLP.
It has also been suggested that, over time, the DLP acted as a bridge for Catholics to transfer loyalty to the Liberal Party: a side of politics where they had been traditionally unwelcome.
National Library of Australia
What are its contemporary implications?
The effects of the split washed out of the political system during the 1970s.
Federal intervention in the Victorian Labor Party in 1970 to correct its post-split deformities was an important prerequisite for the party winning office federally in 1972, and a decade later in Victoria.
The first of these victories undermined the DLP’s fundamental rationale – to deny Labor power nationally. In 1974, it lost its representation in the Senate. A few years later it expired.
Viewed from today’s post-Cold War and secularised society, the conflicts at heart of the split appear curiously arcane. Yet the ghosts of those events linger.
In 1985, four trade unions – including the powerful and conservative Shop Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association – that had affiliated with the DLP in the 1950s were controversially readmitted to the ALP. Their presence continues to influence Labor’s contemporary factional power balance.
The DLP – or its bastard child – resurrected in the 2000s and has since had members elected to the Senate and the Victorian Legislative Council.
We are also reminded of how much the presence in the modern Liberal Party of a high-profile conservative Catholic grouping recast religious political allegiances following the split. Among them is former prime minister Tony Abbott – an unashamed Santamaria protégé.
Paul Strangio, Associate Professor of Politics, Monash University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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