Australia

D

5

Times of Change

After Menzies the Liberals’ fortunes began to wane. Beginning in the late 1960s, Australia experienced the waves of cultural change that swept through many of the Western democracies: the coming of political age of the postwar baby boomers, movements for women’s liberation and indigenous rights, and a growing awareness of environmental issues. A succession of lackluster prime ministers, public disenchantment with the Vietnam War (and Australia’s official support of U.S. policies in the war), and political exhaustion sapped the Liberals’ support.

In 1972, uniting after years of internal disputes, the Labor Party under Gough Whitlam again came to power. “It’s Time,” the party’s campaign slogan, caught the mood of change. Whitlam immediately announced the return of Australian troops from Vietnam. In 1973 the government established an inquiry into Aboriginal land rights, the first step in a process that later led to commonwealth legislation on the subject. Whitlam’s ambitious program of social reforms, however, encountered strong opposition from Liberal state governments. In November 1975 the conservative majority in the Senate, alarmed by the government’s financial imprudence, precipitated a constitutional crisis that culminated in the dismissal of the Whitlam government by governor-general Sir John Kerr. In the ensuing election the Liberal-Country coalition was returned to power under Malcolm Fraser. He reinstated the domestic and foreign policies followed by the earlier Liberal Party governments but maintained Labor’s new emphases on multiculturalism and the environment. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia began to arrive on Australia’s northern shores. In the 1980s and 1990s the flow of immigrants from other parts of Asia, including Hong Kong and mainland China, increased.

Fraser’s coalition survived the 1980 election with a much-reduced majority. Further shaken by defections from Liberal Party ranks and by foreign trade scandals, Fraser suffered a sharp defeat in the elections of March 1983. His Labor successor, the charismatic former trade union leader Bob Hawke, sought to promote cooperation between workers and management and took the first steps toward the deregulation of the economy by floating the Australian dollar. He maintained a staunchly pro-American foreign policy, sending a small military contingent in support of the United States in the Persian Gulf War. Labor retained its majorities in the elections of 1984, 1987, and 1990. In December 1991, with Australia mired in recession and Hawke’s popularity waning, Labor chose Hawke’s former treasury minister, Paul Keating, as party leader and prime minister. Pledging to change Australia to a federal republic and underlining the need for a reorientation toward Asia, Keating led Labor to victory in the March 1993 election.

Among the larger cultural issues with which Australia grappled in the 1980s and early 1990s was the question of Aboriginal land rights. Like other colonial countries such as Canada, Australia was challenged to address the land claims of the indigenous inhabitants of the country, who had been largely ignored for centuries. In 1992, in the historic Mabo v. Queensland case, the High Court of Australia ruled that the people of the Murray Islands, in the Torres Strait, held title to their land, thereby acknowledging that Australia was occupied at the time of European settlement. In 1993 the government passed an act allowing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to file land claims. See also Aboriginal Land Rights Acts.

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By the early 1990s public opinion polls showed that most Australians favored the establishment of a federal republic, with an Australian president replacing the British monarch as head of state. Prime Minister Keating had placed himself at the head of the republican movement, but by the parliamentary elections of 1996 many Australians perceived him as arrogant and his government as out of touch with the electorate. Campaigning on a platform of economic reform, and directing its appeal to the “battlers”—disenchanted working class electors of the bush and outer suburbs—the Liberal-National coalition won a solid majority in the House of Representatives. (In the Senate, however, independents and minor parties held the balance of power until the 2004 elections.)

D

6

The Howard Government

The new prime minister, John Howard, a veteran of the Fraser government, was a longtime advocate of labor-market and taxation reform. On social and moral questions, however, he was considered to be the most conservative prime minister since Menzies. His government’s repeated attempts to curb the rights to native title of land won by Aboriginal people under the Mabo judgment drew international criticism. His attempt in 1998 to break the union power of dockworkers encountered bitter opposition by unionists. Howard narrowly retained power in the parliamentary elections of 1998.

In 1999 the authoritarian Suharto regime crumbled in Indonesia. Howard sent Australian troops under United Nations auspices to secure the independence of East Timor. His decision reversed 20 years of Australian complicity in Indonesian rule over the former Portuguese colony.

D6

a

Domestic Issues

Meanwhile, a constitutional convention voted to change Australia’s government to a republic. Howard, a monarchist, advocated the status quo in the popular referendum required to change the constitution. While opinion polls continued to indicate that most Australians favored a republic, the referendum of November 1999 failed to secure a majority, largely because many voters wanted the president to be popularly elected, instead of appointed by parliament as the convention had recommended.

In September 2000 Australia hosted the Summer Olympic Games at Sydney. In the opening ceremony Australia’s Olympic heroine, Aboriginal sprinter Cathy Freeman, became a central figure in a pageant celebrating a proudly multicultural Australia. The Olympics also turned national attention to many unresolved issues concerning Aboriginal Australians. However, the government chose to ignore these issues, and Howard drew criticism from religious leaders in May 2001 for failing to acknowledge the suffering of thousands of Aboriginal people under government-led assimilation policies of the past.

Meanwhile, Howard carried through his long-held ambition to reform the Australian taxation system by the introduction of a goods and services tax in 2000. The reforms were widely unpopular, and as the 2001 election approached Howard’s government seemed likely to be defeated. Two months before the election, however, Howard’s government won a surge of popular support for its stand against illegal immigration. The government refused a plea by the captain of a Norwegian cargo vessel, the Tampa, to land 450 asylum seekers from the Middle East, mostly from Iraq. In a process that drew international attention and criticism, but was soon repeated with other boatloads of would-be illegal entrants from the Middle East and Afghanistan, the refugees were transported to camps on remote Pacific islands to have their asylum claims processed. (Illegal entrants had previously been sent to detention centers in remote parts of the Australian continent.)

The September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States further rallied support to the Howard government, with voters favoring stability over change in a time of crisis. In the November 2001 election the Liberal-National coalition won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, giving Howard a third term as prime minister.

D6

b

War on Terrorism

Howard subsequently offered strong support for the war on terrorism declared by the United States. His offer took on new significance after 88 Australians were killed in a terrorist bombing in Bali, Indonesia, in October 2002. Howard contributed Australian troops to the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, his decision to send about 2,000 Australian troops to Iraq failed to gain widespread public support. In February 2003 the Senate passed its first-ever vote of no confidence against an Australian prime minister to express its disapproval of Howard’s decision. Nevertheless, Howard positioned himself as a strong ally of U.S. president George W. Bush and pledged to keep Australian troops in Iraq for as long as necessary. (By late 2004, about 850 noncombat troops remained there.) See also U.S.-Iraq War.

D6

c

2004 and 2007 Elections

Meanwhile, the Howard government sustained a period of economic growth noted for low unemployment and inflation rates. The robust economy was widely credited with delivering a resounding victory for Howard’s Liberal-National coalition in the October 2004 parliamentary elections. The coalition won solid majorities in both houses of the Australian parliament, securing Howard’s fourth term as prime minister and giving the government control over the Senate for the first time in two decades.

However, the ruling coalition fared poorly in the 2007 elections. Voters gave an overwhelming victory to the Australian Labor Party, and ALP leader Kevin Rudd was named prime minister. Rudd had campaigned on the need for new leadership after 11 years of conservative government under Howard, promising major policy changes. Rudd also said he planned to increase the government’s expenditure on education, while maintaining a fiscally conservative budget, as a necessary step in preparing Australia for the future.

Among his first acts in office, Rudd signed the Kyōto Protocol on global warming, leaving the United States as the only developed country failing to ratify the international agreement. Rudd also issued the federal government’s first formal apology to Indigenous Australians for past laws and policies that had “inflicted profound grief, suffering, and loss.” His apology noted the so-called Stolen Generations, who as children had been forcibly removed from their families under ill-conceived assimilation policies. The long-awaited federal apology was seen as a necessary step toward national reconciliation. Nevertheless, the Rudd government ruled out any national reparations scheme, promising instead to increase funding in health, education, and counseling services for Indigenous Australians.

Graeme John Davison reviewed the History section of this article.

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