tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/john-howard-1075/articlesJohn Howard – The Conversation2024-03-17T19:01:55Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2203272024-03-17T19:01:55Z2024-03-17T19:01:55ZOutrage is a key performance indicator for Peter Dutton, the ‘bad cop’ of politics. But what does he value?<p>Lech Blaine and Peter Dutton are both from Queensland, where the political culture is tough and masculine and politics south of the border always good for a spot of confected outrage. </p>
<p>So Blaine, author of <a href="https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2021/09/top-blokes">Quarterly Essay 83: Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power</a>, is a good choice to try to make some sense of the federal Liberal Party’s current leader. </p>
<p>Who is Peter Dutton? What drives him? Why did he choose politics? What does power mean to him? And what does he hope to achieve if he wins government? </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics: Quarterly Essay – Lech Blaine (Black Inc.)</em></p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/bad-cop">Bad Cop</a>, Blaine’s second Quarterly Essay, mixes straightforward narration of events in Dutton’s life with perceptive interpretation and one-liners like: “Politics would enable Dutton to be the bad cop without fear of physical injury.” </p>
<p>Dutton’s first job was as a policeman, which exposed him to the worst of human behaviour. He took from this experience a suspicion of the legal system’s presumption of innocence and its strict rules of evidence, disdain for those who try to understand human criminality and transgression, and no compassion at all for the criminal and depraved. </p>
<p>When <a href="https://iview.abc.net.au/show/kitchen-cabinet/series/7/video/FA2211H002S00">on Kitchen Cabinet</a>, Annabel Crabb put to him his wife Kirrilly’s description of him as black and white, without shades of grey, he agreed. </p>
<p>But, as Blaine shows, we know much more about the black in Dutton’s world than the white: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jan/03/peter-dutton-says-victorians-scared-to-go-out-because-of-african-gang-violence">African gangs</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/fake-refugees-dutton-adopts-an-alternative-fact-to-justify-our-latest-human-rights-violation-78175">illegal immigrants</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2020/feb/25/kristina-keneally-calls-for-bettina-arndt-to-be-stripped-of-australia-day-honour-politics-live">Islamic terrorists</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/nov/22/peter-dutton-lebanese-muslim-comments-dismay-security-services-labor">Lebanese criminals</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/no-peter-dutton-most-deported-kiwis-arent-paedophiles-and-youre-hurting-our-relationship-with-nz-120655">paedophiles</a>, <a href="https://nit.com.au/19-10-2023/8231/this-is-not-what-first-nations-people-want-coalition-of-groups-attack-peter-duttons-call-for-a-royal-commission">Indigenous sexual abusers</a>, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/one-in-five-a-dole-cheat-minister-20050305-gdzq37.html">welfare cheats</a>. </p>
<p>It is a richly peopled world, compared with the bland suburbia and regional Australia he wants to protect, with much more energy expended on blaming and punishing than on praising. Compared with John Howard, with whom he shares aspects of political style, we know little about Dutton’s heroes and what he values about Australia. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bdPM6nKuMJU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">We know little about what Peter Dutton values about Australia.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>In his interests to stoke fear</h2>
<p>Dutton is a boundary rider. As a politician whose main offering is the promise of safety, it is in his interests to stoke fear. </p>
<p>He thrives on conflict and when he is not fighting the criminals and depraved, he is fighting those who are not as alert as he is to danger: human rights advocates, inner-city elites, bleeding hearts, the welfare lobby, the Greens, and of course his arch enemy in our two-party Westminster system, the Labor Party. </p>
<p>Mostly, it seems what he wants is a reaction. For Dutton, says Blaine, outrage from Labor, the Greens and on Twitter is a key performance indicator. Hence his political strategy of abandoning the inner city to Labor, the Greens and the Teals – and winning government from the outer suburbs and the regions. </p>
<p>The big question facing Dutton’s political future and his electoral strategy is whether Australia is quite as fearful and homogeneous as he imagines, or whether, as Blaine argues, he is forever riding a time machine to 2001.</p>
<p>Dutton resigned from the police after he crashed his car during a chase. He shifted into property developing with his father, and then into politics. In 2001, John Howard’s Tampa election, Dutton won the seat of Dickson, which he still holds. </p>
<p>It was, says Blaine, a fateful moment for an ex-policeman with authoritarian tendencies to embark on a political career. But compared with Howard, we have little sense of what else, besides safety and not being Labor, Dutton is offering. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-liberals-lost-the-moral-middle-class-and-now-the-teal-independents-may-well-cash-in-182293">How the Liberals lost the 'moral middle class' - and now the teal independents may well cash in</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Style over substance</h2>
<p>Howard had enduring policy interests – in economic policy and industrial relations. Does Dutton have any policy interests, besides law and order? He was not even especially competent in his <a href="https://theconversation.com/peter-dutton-becomes-national-security-ministerial-tsar-in-portfolio-shake-up-81186">supersized ministry of Home Affairs</a>, where his obsession with keeping out asylum seekers at any cost distracted him from the border incursions of organised crime and the systemic rorting of the immigration system, together with problems with the award of contracts. </p>
<p>As Minister for Home Affairs, concludes Blaine, “His bad cop act was a triumph of style over substance.” His championing of nuclear power to reduce Australia’s emissions, despite all the <a href="https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/nuclear-power-stations-are-not-appropriate-for-australia-and-probably-never-will-be/">expert evidence</a> it is much more expensive than renewables and will take too long, shows that opposing Labor rather than solving problems is his primary motivation.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-a-mature-debate-about-nuclear-power-by-the-time-weve-had-one-new-plants-will-be-too-late-to-replace-coal-224513">Dutton wants a 'mature debate' about nuclear power. By the time we've had one, new plants will be too late to replace coal</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581217/original/file-20240312-20-cpokru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581217/original/file-20240312-20-cpokru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581217/original/file-20240312-20-cpokru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581217/original/file-20240312-20-cpokru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581217/original/file-20240312-20-cpokru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581217/original/file-20240312-20-cpokru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581217/original/file-20240312-20-cpokru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581217/original/file-20240312-20-cpokru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lech Blaine gives ‘a compelling account of Dutton the strong man’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Black Inc.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Blaine gives a compelling account of Dutton the strong man, but he also claims that if you watch him for a long time, you see a man who is small and scared. The <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo27832683.html">pioneering political psychologist Harold Lasswell says</a> politicians like Dutton, preoccupied with the management of aggression and with provoking reaction, are driven by low self-esteem and a compulsive need for deference. </p>
<p>This fits Blaine’s observation, but I needed more on this side of the man. What is he scared of and why? Of being ignored and irrelevant? Of inner demons that need to be kept under lock and key? Of a world that is changing? All of the above? </p>
<p>Writing about the moving target of a politician seeking power is a tough gig. Some learn as they go, some don’t. It’s too early yet to tell is Dutton is a learner or not – but Blaine has told us what to watch out for.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220327/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Judith Brett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In his second Quarterly Essay, Lech Blaine tries to make sense of former Queensland policeman Peter Dutton. Who is he? What drives him? And what does he hope to achieve if he wins government?Judith Brett, Emeritus Professor of Politics, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2178122023-12-31T20:27:44Z2023-12-31T20:27:44ZCabinet papers 2003: Howard government sends Australia into the Iraq war<p>By far the most significant decision the Howard government made in 2003 was to support the invasion of Iraq. Journalists and historians have <a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/iraq-lessons-the-cabinet-submission-that-never-was/">long maintained</a> there was no submission to full cabinet weighing the pros and cons of the Australian intervention. Cabinet papers from 2003 released today by the National Archives of Australia confirm this.</p>
<p>While the Howard government had many other important issues to manage in that year, the Iraq War consumed most attention and sparked most debate in the wider community.</p>
<h2>Entering the war</h2>
<p>Cabinet’s National Security Committee had been closely monitoring Iraq and its possible possession of weapons of mass destruction. But in March 2003, Prime Minister John Howard <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/iraq-2003-retrospective">asked the full cabinet</a> to confirm the decision to commit Australia to war. </p>
<p>Despite US urging, the UN Security Council failed to authorise the use of force. It preferred instead to exhaust all opportunities for diplomacy. </p>
<p>On March 18, Howard informed his cabinet colleagues that US President George W. Bush had given Iraqi President Saddam Hussein <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/18/iraq.usa1">an ultimatum</a>. Australia was asked to support the United States if Iraq did not fully comply with Bush’s demands. </p>
<p>In the absence of explicit Security Council authorisation, Howard relied for legal justification on a <a href="https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA108837721&sid=sitemap&v=2.1&it=r&p=EAIM&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Eeba0625d&aty=open-web-entry">memorandum of advice</a>, signed by two officials at the level of first assistant secretary from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Attorney-General’s Department. Iraq, the memorandum argued, had not complied with earlier Security Council resolutions on weapons of mass destruction. Consequently, Australian participation in military intervention would be legal.</p>
<p>Gavan Griffith, Australia’s solicitor-general from 1984-1997, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/this-war-is-illegal-howards-last-top-law-man-20030321-gdggwb.html">regarded the legal advice</a> as “untenable” and “Alice in Wonderland nonsense”. </p>
<p>The memorandum was nonetheless important for persuading public opinion. Governor-General Peter Hollingworth had earlier asked to see legal advice from the attorney-general, perhaps assuming the decision would be his, acting on advice from the government. Howard advised Hollingworth there was <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3033384">no need</a> to refer to the governor-general any decision to commit Australia to war. </p>
<p>The Howard government instead proceeded with the defence minister using his legal powers under the Defence Act as amended in 1975. This alleviated any need for the attorney-general to provide legal advice to the governor-general, as Sir John Kerr <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/kerr-fraser-conflict-a-precedent-for-gg-intervention-20220821-p5bbjl">had demanded</a> of the Fraser government in 1977 in regard to appointing the head of the Department of the Special Trade Negotiator, for which Howard was the responsible minister. </p>
<p>The cabinet minute of March 18 2003 smoothed the legal and constitutional difficulties. The attorney-general, it read, agreed with the memorandum submitted by the first assistant secretaries. The governor-general had been consulted but did not need to give his approval, and cabinet had agreed to send Australian troops to war. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/iraq-20-years-on-death-came-from-the-skies-on-march-19-2003-and-the-killing-continues-to-this-day-201988">Iraq 20 years on: death came from the skies on March 19 2003 – and the killing continues to this day</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Proceeding without a cabinet submission enabled Howard to <a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/the-enduring-lessons-of-the-iraq-war/">dispense with advice</a> to cabinet on four other matters. </p>
<p>One was the <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/iraq-how-we-were-duped-20050514-ge05vq.html">circumstantial nature</a> of the intelligence used to justify the invasion. </p>
<p>Another was the <a href="https://theconversation.com/iraq-20-years-on-death-came-from-the-skies-on-march-19-2003-and-the-killing-continues-to-this-day-201988">sectarian chaos</a> that could have been predicted to follow in Iraq. </p>
<p>A third was the danger of military intervention <a href="https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/iran-and-iraq-war-2003-real-victor">empowering Iran</a>. </p>
<p>A fourth was the consequences for the Australian-United States alliance. Any decision to rebuff Bush’s request would have been treated coldly by his administration. Howard <a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/iraq-lessons-the-cabinet-submission-that-never-was-part-2/">was determined</a> to take advantage of the Iraq war to strengthen the alliance. </p>
<p>Another middle power and NATO ally, Canada, demonstrated its independence without incurring Washington’s enduring resentment. Prime Minister Jean Chretien <a href="https://opencanada.org/how-canadas-intelligence-agencies-helped-keep-the-country-out-of-the-2003-iraq-war/">insisted</a> Canada would not join in military action without United Nations authorisation. The leader of the Labor opposition, Simon Crean, eventually <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/simon-crean-stuck-to-his-guns-on-the-iraq-war-and-was-proven-right-20230626-p5djif.html">adopted this position</a> too. </p>
<p>Officials in the Department of Defence and Foreign Affairs and Trade <a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/iraq-lessons-the-impact-of-the-howard-fib/">did not regard it as their role</a> to offer strategic advice on matters already decided by ministers. This pattern of policy-making indicated the <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/essays/my-how-things-have-changed/">increasing subordination</a> of the public service to ministers since the 1980s. It also reflected the increasingly presidential view Howard had of the office of prime minister. </p>
<p>In 2003, public opinion <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/polls-apart-on-whether-this-is-a-conflict-worth-waging-20030401-gdgizs.html">was opposed</a> to Australian participation in the war. However, the government was aided by the <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/node/62/wrap-xhr#mtr">effusive support</a> of News Corporation papers for its position on the war. </p>
<h2>Beyond the war</h2>
<p>The release includes many other submissions and decisions. Some relate to negotiation of a free trade agreement with the United States. </p>
<p>Ten years after the agreement came into force, however, <a href="https://insidestory.org.au/the-costs-of-australias-free-trade-agreement-with-america/">analysis showed</a> it had diverted trade away from the lowest-cost sources. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme was also affected. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-trade-deal-undermined-australias-pbs-32573">How the US trade deal undermined Australia's PBS</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Other papers relate to health policy. Howard sought to blunt an effective Labor campaign against the erosion of the rate of bulk-billing under Medicare. Accordingly, Health Minister Kay Patterson introduced a A$900 million package.</p>
<p>“A Fairer Medicare” was highly criticised, including by a <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Former_Committees/medicare/fairer_medicare/index">Senate inquiry</a>. It described the package as a “decisive step away from the principle of universality that has underpinned Medicare since its inception”. </p>
<p>With the 2004 election looming, Patterson was replaced by Tony Abbott, who later announced a compromise package called <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/abbott-backs-medicare-plus-reforms-20031202-gdhwa7.html">Medicare Plus</a>. It achieved more success by including higher reimbursements for doctors and an extended Medicare safety net aimed at addressing out-of-pocket costs. </p>
<p>A decision on the environment is also noteworthy. Howard appointed a committee to devise an affordable long-term plan to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. An emissions trading scheme was recommended.</p>
<p>The plan received the backing of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, as well as that of Treasurer Peter Costello, Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane and Environment Minister David Kemp. In July, the strategy was taken to cabinet but later, after discussions with industry representatives, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/howard-blows-hot-and-cold-on-emissions-20061115-ge3kkq.html">Howard dumped it</a>. </p>
<p>Years later, in 2006, under pressure from the “millennium drought”, Howard changed his mind and accepted Treasury’s advice to adopt an emissions trading scheme. Howard’s Labor successors, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, implemented the scheme. In 2013, the Abbott government demolished the scheme with the enthusiastic support of business. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-too-hard-basket-a-short-history-of-australias-aborted-climate-policies-101812">The too hard basket: a short history of Australia's aborted climate policies</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Resources boom – and missed opportunities</h2>
<p>In October 2003, the leaders of the United States and China both visited Australia. This offered hope Australia could maintain a constructive relationship with its closest ally as well as its major trading partner. </p>
<p>By 2003, Australia was on the cusp of one its greatest resource booms, fuelled by Chinese demand. The boom gave the government space to turn its attention to a range of reforms in areas such as defence, health, communications and education policy. </p>
<p>Three opportunities were missed in 2003. </p>
<p>One was to establish a sovereign wealth fund to invest the temporary windfall gains from the mining boom. </p>
<p>A second was to establish an emissions trading scheme. </p>
<p>A third was to advance progress on constitutional recognition of Indigenous people.
This had to wait until 2007 when Howard at last <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/the-quest-for-indigenous-recognition/john-howard#:%7E:text=I%20n%20October%202007%2C%20in,was%20to%20be%20re%2Delected.">recommended a referendum</a> to recognise the role of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australian history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217812/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Lee is a member of Australians for War Powers Reform. </span></em></p>The 2003 Cabinet papers, released today by the National Archives of Australia, reveal the machinations over Australia’s entry into the Iraq war.David Lee, Associate Professor of History, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2149602023-10-11T19:06:33Z2023-10-11T19:06:33Z‘We should be listening’: the long history of Liberal innovation – and failure – on Indigenous policy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552624/original/file-20231007-19-4viaai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains the names and images of deceased people.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>We have had compelling accounts from Indigenous activists of “<a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/long-road-uluru-walking-together-truth-before-justice-megan-davis/">the long road to Uluru</a>”. But another perspective on the Voice debate can also be gleaned from the political insiders – especially Coalition leaders – who engaged with Indigenous communities, learned from them, sought to develop consultative and policy solutions, yet failed to “close the gap”.</p>
<p>The furious opposition of the current Coalition parties to the Voice disowns their own history and an initiative that was arguably their own creation. So it is illuminating to explore their divergence from some of their former leaders who were passionate about trying to fix Indigenous disadvantage.</p>
<p>Paul Hasluck, journalist, historian, and diplomat was elected for the Liberals to parliament in 1949. Growing up in country Western Australia with Indigenous friends, he empathised with their connection to Country. </p>
<p>Curiosity stimulated his masters thesis, Black Australians, an account of 19th century relations between Indigenous people and colonists in Western Australia, published in 1942. He was appointed minister for territories in 1951.</p>
<p>He sought first to work with the states but faced resistance: they insisted they were already doing everything possible for “native welfare” and that it was a minor problem. Hasluck tried to bring change to the Northern Territory, hoping success would induce states to follow his lead. The difficulties were considerable: a department whose efforts were desultory, an administration that dragged its feet, a lack of bureaucratic and economic infrastructure in the Territory.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck tried to introduce policies to ameliorate Indigenous disadvantage, but ultimately failed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.robertmenziesinstitute.org.au/afternoon-light-podcast/william-sanders">Robert Menzies Institute</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hasluck persisted, aware of key factors driving policy failure in settler-Indigenous relations: racism, inequality, disparity in administration across states, inability to ameliorate Indigenous disadvantage, denial of agency. He sought to address this through cooperative federalism. </p>
<p>But his was a vision of assimilation, limited by inherited patterns of thought. It discounted the affiliations that tied Indigenous people to social and group identity. </p>
<p>Hasluck <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1891893">eventually understood</a> that he had been captured by tunnel vision. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>My outlook on aboriginal welfare […] influenced by the evangelism of mid and late Victorian England […] placed emphasis on the individual. The individual made the choice and made the effort and as a result was changed. This influence […] meant that we did not see clearly the ways in which the individual is bound by membership of a family or a group.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Success in 1967 – but deep division remains</h2>
<p>In the 1950s and 1960s, widespread recognition of the need for change led to bipartisan support for and success in the <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2017/May/The_1967_Referendum">1967 constitutional referendum</a>. </p>
<p>Prime Minister Harold Holt then established the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. His successor, <a href="https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-2408">Billy McMahon, signalled policy change</a>. McMahon said Indigenous peoples </p>
<blockquote>
<p>should be encouraged and assisted to preserve and develop their culture, their languages, their traditions and arts so that these can become living elements in the diverse culture of Australian society.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>McMahon tried to bridge divisions in his Coalition by offering a Northern Territory Land Board that could grant 50-year leases to Indigenous groups that could prove a long and continuing connection with land, rather than the land rights Indigenous groups were demanding. The fallout was such that it sparked the establishment of the <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/aboriginal-tent-embassy">Aboriginal Tent embassy</a> in 1972.</p>
<p>So it was that Gough Whitlam picked up the baton, making land rights a centrepiece of Labor policy. Among his initiatives were the Racial Discrimination Act (1975) expunging state laws restricting the rights of Indigenous people. He also established <a href="https://antar.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-Woodward-Royal-Commission-Factsheet-1.pdf">a royal commission</a> into land rights in the Northern Territory. The Whitlam government’s Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Bill (1975) was drawn from its recommendations.</p>
<h2>Fraser picks up where Whitlam left off</h2>
<p>However, it was Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser who, in 1976, passed the Land Rights legislation that Whitlam had developed, but had been unable to progress in the Senate before his 1975 dismissal. He also passed the Aboriginal Councils and Association Act, allowing Indigenous bodies to register as corporations for community purposes. </p>
<p>This was the foundation for hundreds of Indigenous corporations, a springboard for community development that stimulated the emergence of Indigenous social entrepreneurs. Once a staunch assimilationist, Fraser had visited remote communities, met with impressive Indigenous leaders such as Galarrway Yunupingu, and now Indigenous policy reform became part of his broader Human Rights Agenda.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Malcolm Fraser and Galarrwuy Yunupingu in Arnhem Land, 1978.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/australias-prime-ministers/malcolm-fraser/during-office">National Archives of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Fraser established an Aboriginal Development Commission, directed by Charlie Perkins, and a National Aboriginal Conference, (NAC) chaired by Lowitja O’Donoghue. His Administrative Appeals Tribunal (1977) and Human Rights Commission (1981) provided additional avenues for Indigenous scrutiny and appeal against decisions affecting them.</p>
<p>All of these were opposed from within the Coalition parties themselves. Their carriage required resolute action. They were radical initiatives in conservative circles. Yet, <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/malcolm-fraser-paperback-softback">reflecting later</a>, Fraser rued that he was too timid, that he should have acted on an idea raised by the NAC: to negotiate a treaty.</p>
<h2>Command and control rather than community engagement</h2>
<p>John Howard’s policy initiatives were the next significant Coalition incursion into Indigenous conditions. He provoked Indigenous leaders by refusing to apologise for the actions of past governments. He abolished Bob Hawke’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC) – the first legislated attempt to combine consultation and program management under Indigenous leadership – announcing the “experiment” in self-determination had failed.</p>
<p>His legislative response to the <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/research_pub/wik-coexistance-pastrol-leases-mining-nati-vetitle-ten-point-plan_0_3.pdf">Wik High Court decision</a> enabled him to amend the Keating government’s landmark <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/about-native-title">Native Title Act</a>, itself a response to the High Court’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-the-mabo-decision-and-native-title-74147">Mabo decision</a>. </p>
<p>Finally, he endorsed the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), a remarkable attempt to address dysfunction and restore order in remote communities by mobilising army and police intervention where Indigenous responsibility had failed. Significantly, it was also Howard who first raised the prospect of Constitutional recognition.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ten-years-on-its-time-we-learned-the-lessons-from-the-failed-northern-territory-intervention-79198">Ten years on, it's time we learned the lessons from the failed Northern Territory Intervention</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Howard had a clear rationale for each of these steps. Apology, Howard argued, could only be offered by the perpetrator of wrongs. ATSIC, despite research now confirming <a href="https://www.nla.gov.au/stories/video/fellowship-presentation-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-commission-toward#:%7E:text=In%2520this%2520Fellowship%2520presentation%252C%2520Associate,its%2520achievements%2520and%2520its%2520legacies.">the extent of its achievement</a> under the indomitable Indigenous public servants Lowitja O’Donoghue and Pat Turner, had later fallen under heavy scrutiny before being abolished in 2005. It was also subject to incandescent <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/the-end-of-big-men-politics/">critique by Indigenous leaders</a> and lost the faith of the Labor Party which had created it. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-Sc_-wVvzdQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The Wik decision, like Mabo, demanded legislative address. The NTER was a response to a <a href="https://www.indigenousjustice.gov.au/resources/ampe-akelyernemane-meke-mekarle-little-children-are-sacred-report-of-the-northern-territory-board-of-inquiry-into-the-protection-of-aboriginal-children-from-sexual-abuse/">devastating report of domestic violence and child abuse</a>, and had followed advice, and was supported, by influential Indigenous public intellectuals such as Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/many-claim-australias-longest-running-indigenous-body-failed-heres-why-thats-wrong-209511">Many claim Australia’s longest-running Indigenous body failed. Here’s why that’s wrong</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>It was these Indigenous advisers, too, who persuaded Howard to support Constitutional recognition. Nonetheless, major initiatives proceeded hurriedly, without explanation or consultation with the Indigenous communities affected.</p>
<h2>The Coalition’s reconciliation agenda leads to Uluru</h2>
<p>It is striking, if one leaves aside the inadequacy of Tony Abbott’s <a href="https://www.indigenous.gov.au/indigenous-advancement-strategy">Indigenous Advancement Strategy</a> (which again ignored the necessity of community engagement), or the Coalition’s outsourcing or offloading to states of Closing the Gap arrangements, that the next significant initiative was fostered by a bipartisan meeting on advancing reconciliation between Abbott (with Bill Shorten) and Indigenous leaders. </p>
<p>There followed a Referendum Council established by Abbott’s successor, Malcolm Turnbull, with a sub-committee of the same Indigenous leaders tasked with creating a dialogue on reconciliation with Indigenous communities nationwide. It led directly to the National Constitutional Convention that delivered the Uluru Statement in 2017. </p>
<p>The Uluru Statement then, responding to years of lobbying by those most closely engaged with Indigenous disadvantage, was developed by Indigenous representatives with the encouragement of successive Coalition administrations. </p>
<p>Yet it was Turnbull who declared that its proposal for a Voice referendum was not politically feasible. Turnbull has since <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/malcolm-turnbull-opens-up-on-his-changing-opinions-with-the-voice-referendum/video/86257acb8aaca03e967961d569277b8a">endorsed the current referendum</a>, arguing “a lot has changed since then […] the Indigenous community has backed this in for six years […] we should be listening to how they want to be recognised”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hsj0Yth5zew?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>A Coalition trapped by ‘settler liberalism’</h2>
<p>Some of these engaged politicians looked back with remorse and saw how they had been constrained by their own political frameworks (Hasluck), hobbled by their colleagues’ policy priorities (McMahon, Turnbull), or too cautious (Fraser). </p>
<p>Above all, they recognised that their failure lay in not having heard what Indigenous communities told them. One might have expected the cumulative knowledge of these policy leaders to have influenced their peers. Yet what they had learned was rarely understood by their successors.</p>
<p>Partly it was a symptom of endemic short-termism. More significant, however, was another strand, exemplified by Hasluck’s rueful recollection: a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/030437540102600201">“settler liberalism”</a> that takes its own commitment to a particular form of individualistic liberal freedom so much for granted that it is blind to collective forms of social relations, and to the structural and institutional consequences of colonisation. </p>
<p>Howard and Mal Brough, the minister who so energetically drove the NTER, were undoubtedly committed to better outcomes for remote communities. They were, unlike Hasluck and Fraser, not remorseful about <a href="https://theconversation.com/just-ask-us-come-and-see-us-aboriginal-young-people-in-the-northern-territory-must-be-listened-to-not-punished-199297">the trauma and dismay that is still evident</a> as a consequence of the intervention. Instead, they were frustrated that successors had not seen it fully developed to address dysfunction in the manner proposed. Their conviction is a manifestation of the persistence of settler liberalism, now so much embedded in the contemporary Coalition’s engagement in the Voice debate.</p>
<p>So here we are, cycling back decades while the remorse of Liberal innovators about the limitations on what they could achieve is forgotten. With it, settler liberalism is reincarnated as a salve that Hasluck, Fraser and others would have thought discredited in their day.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214960/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Walter has received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past for research on which this article is based. </span></em></p>Many Liberal politicians have been passionate about redressing Indigenous disadvantage, but have come unstuck by the pitfall of ‘settler liberalism’.James Walter, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2052052023-05-08T12:31:36Z2023-05-08T12:31:36ZNow it’s Labor promising the budget will be (briefly) back in black<p>Tuesday’s budget will forecast a surplus of about $4 billion for this financial year – the first Commonwealth budget surplus in a decade and a half.</p>
<p>The budget projects an improvement of more than $143 billion over four years to 2025-26 compared to the Coalition’s final budget, brought down in March last year by Josh Frydenberg. </p>
<p>The budget was last in surplus in Coalition Prime Minister John Howard’s final year – 2007-2008. After the global financial crisis threw it into deficit, in 2019 Frydenberg declared the budget “back in black”, but the COVID support measures meant the promised surplus was never achieved. </p>
<p>While the budget is forecast to be in deficit over the remaining years of the forward estimates, the deficits will be smaller in each year than previously forecast. </p>
<p>Revenue will be boosted by stronger than expected employment growth and record-high commodity prices, both of which are expected to ease off in future years.</p>
<p>The government will return to the bottom line 82% of revenue upgrades in this budget and 87% across its first two budgets. It says this compares to an average of about 40% under the former government and 30% under the Howard government. </p>
<p>Immediately after landing back in Australia after his trip to the coronation, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed the budget will widen access to the parenting payment (single) by raising the cut off point from when the parent’s youngest child is eight to the age of 14.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1655345893158326273"}"></div></p>
<p>At present these parents – overwhelmingly women, and often victims of domestic violence – have to move to the lower JobKeeper payment when their youngest turns eight. The change will mean eligible single parents now on JobSeeker will receive an increase of $176.90 a fortnight. </p>
<p>The issue has been personally important to Albanese, who was raised by a single mother on the disability pension. Albanese was opposed to the Gillard’s government’s decision to tighten eligibility, which followed an earlier decision to restrict parenting payments by the Howard government.</p>
<p>Albanese said the government’s action “will make a big and immediate difference for tens of thousands of mums, dads and children right around Australia”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-budget-centrepiece-will-be-14-6-billion-cost-of-living-package-205192">View from The Hill: Budget 'centrepiece' will be $14.6 billion cost-of-living package</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The change, which requires legislation, is due to start from September 20. It will cost $1.9 billion through to 2026-27. Some 57,000 single principal carers will benefit, including 52,000 women. </p>
<p>The government last week announced it would scrap from next year the controversial ParentsNext program which imposed obligations for mothers with very young children. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/controversial-parentsnext-program-to-be-scrapped-next-year-205037">Controversial ParentsNext program to be scrapped next year</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Among the budget’s welfare decisions, JobSeeker is expected to be raised by a modest amount. </p>
<p>The budget will contain $17.8 billion in savings and re-purposing. This will take total savings across Labor’s first two budgets to $40 billion. </p>
<p>The budget’s centrepiece is a package of measures designed to ease cost-of-living pressures, costing a $14.6 billion over four years, including assistance for more than 500,000 households with their energy bills. </p>
<p>In an upbeat address to an enthusiastic Labor caucus meeting Albanese said the budget would be “in the best tradition of the Australian Labor Party”. </p>
<p>It would deal with immediate challenges, “but always with the eye on the future, on the medium and long term, to make sure that we’re delivering, laying those foundations for a better future that we promised”.</p>
<p>He said as well as not leaving people behind, the budget would be about the “aspiration of people for a better life”. </p>
<p>The caucus welcomed the new member for Aston, Mary Doyle, who took the seat from the opposition at the April 1 byelection.</p>
<p>The government is focused on minimising the inflationary effect of budget measures, with Albanese telling caucus inflation was “a tax on the poor”. The opposition is preparing to make a central argument against the budget that it is inflationary. </p>
<p>Shadow finance minister Jane Hume said tackling inflation should be the number one priority. “If they really wanted to tackle the cost of living, they would tackle inflation first and foremost” by reining in spending. </p>
<p>Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley said any surplus the government delivered would be “because of the strong economic book that they inherited from us”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205205/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The budget projects an improvement of more than $143 billion over four years, compared to the Coalition’s final budget, brought down in March last year by Josh FrydenbergMichelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2036542023-04-30T20:03:03Z2023-04-30T20:03:03ZThe Liberals are the fifth iteration of Australia’s main centre-right party. Could the Voice campaign hasten a sixth?<p>Party stability on the progressive side of politics, and repeated party reconfiguration on the conservative side of politics, is a marked contrast in the history of Australia’s two-party political system.</p>
<p>That history is relevant now, as the Liberals find themselves in the electoral wilderness, and as a schism emerges over its stance on the referendum for an Indigenous Voice to the Australian parliament.</p>
<p>It raises a legitimate question about whether, as has happened several times in the past, the Liberal Party might be superseded by a new vehicle that better represents mainstream liberal and conservative voters’ interests and provides a viable electoral alternative to Labor.</p>
<h2>A party of many iterations</h2>
<p>In contrast to the Australian Labor Party, which predates Federation in 1901 and has existed continuously since, the Liberal Party was formed in 1944 and formally launched in 1945. It is the fifth iteration of the main vehicles through which the centre-right has sought federal parliamentary representation.</p>
<p>Federally, the Liberal Party’s genealogy is: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>Protectionist Party, Free Trade Party (1901-1909) </p></li>
<li><p>Commonwealth Liberal Party (1909-1917)</p></li>
<li><p>Nationalist Party (1917-1931)</p></li>
<li><p>United Australia Party (1931-1945)</p></li>
<li><p>Liberal Party (1945+).</p></li>
</ul>
<p>The earliest parliaments were dominated by, as Alfred Deakin <a href="https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1903-alfred-deakin">famously dubbed them</a>, “the three elevens” – because it was like having three cricket teams play the same match. They were the Deakin-led Protectionist Party, the Free Trade Party (later renamed the Anti-Socialist Party) and the Labor Party. </p>
<p>In 1909 the Protectionist Party and Anti-Socialist Party united to create the Commonwealth Liberal Party to compete with Labor, ushering in the “two party” era.</p>
<p>The next two iterations saw the main anti-Labor party unite, from opposition, with Labor breakaways to form a new party.</p>
<p>In 1917, the opposition Commonwealth Liberals merged with Billy Hughes’ breakaway National Labor Party to form the Nationalist Party, which held office under the prime ministership of Hughes and later Stanley Melbourne Bruce. </p>
<p>In 1931, the Nationalist Party opposition and Labor defector Joseph Lyons and his allies joined to form the United Australia Party (UAP). This was the vehicle for Lyons’ prime ministership and, on his death, Robert Menzies’ first prime ministership. </p>
<p>The UAP became increasingly dysfunctional after Lyons’ death. Menzies proved a poor war-time prime minister, was unpopular with colleagues, and resigned as prime minister in 1941. The coalition UAP-Country Party government of Arthur Fadden fell several weeks later after losing a confidence motion on the floor of parliament, succeeded by the Curtin Labor government.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523371/original/file-20230428-14-txal0u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523371/original/file-20230428-14-txal0u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523371/original/file-20230428-14-txal0u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523371/original/file-20230428-14-txal0u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523371/original/file-20230428-14-txal0u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523371/original/file-20230428-14-txal0u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523371/original/file-20230428-14-txal0u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The United Australia Party became increasingly dysfunctional after the death, in office, of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.stanleyheritagewalk.com.au/en/locations/3/">Stanley Heritage Walk</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Labor’s landslide 1943 election win finished the UAP as a political force. The party’s primary vote slumped to 21.9% and it won just 14 of the federal parliament’s then 74 seats. </p>
<p>Menzies drove the Liberal Party’s foundation as a fresh start for centre-right politics in Australia.</p>
<p>His insight that the UAP was terminal was partly driven by the large amount of political activity that sprang up from centre-right forces outside the party’s bounds. This included a large number of independent anti-Labor candidates running at the 1943 election. </p>
<p>The upsurge in centrist community independent candidates – notably the Teals ¬– running at the 2022 federal election is a striking parallel.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-liberal-party-is-in-a-dire-state-across-australia-right-now-that-should-worry-us-all-191851">The Liberal Party is in a dire state across Australia right now. That should worry us all</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Could the Liberal Party be reborn again?</h2>
<p>Forming a new political party is a drastic move. The calculus on whether an existing party is still viable and can be renewed, or whether, as Menzies judged with the UAP, it is too far gone and needs to replaced, is a delicate one.</p>
<p>Former prime minister and Liberal leader John Howard declared after the 2022 election that “<a href="https://youtu.be/S-JtjZTYN58">we have to hold ourselves together</a>”, arguing Peter Dutton was the right man for the job.</p>
<p>Holding the Liberal Party together has since become established as the benchmark for Dutton’s success or failure as opposition leader. This is either a low bar or it’s a sign that the Liberal Party is indeed at risk of breaking apart.</p>
<p>These tensions date from the early 1980s under Howard’s aegis, when the conservative push to crush moderate viewpoints began in earnest. </p>
<p>Howard and conservative Liberal leadership successors since demanded the selling out of principled centrist policy positions as the price of moderates’ inclusion in cabinet and shadow cabinet. </p>
<p>Liberal moderates persistently paid that price in exchange for ministerial advancement. This in turn hastened the Liberals’ lurch to the right. The party become less and less reflective of mainstream Australia even as some visible moderates survived and rose through the ministerial ranks. </p>
<p>Women especially feel unwelcome in the party. The bullying of MP Julia Banks and her subsequent resignation from the Liberals in 2018 became emblematic of the party’s toxic masculinity problem. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kjIjm4RkEKY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Former prime minister Scott Morrison’s misogynistic handling of sexual violence allegations concerning Liberal Party figures followed. Female voters remember this in the ballot box.</p>
<p>The pervasiveness of evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics in the branch membership combined with, under the influence of Sky News “After Dark” programming, US Republican-style fringe interests and agendas, are alienating people who in other eras could or would have been branch members. There seems to be little space now for moderate Liberals.</p>
<p>People trying to improve things quietly from the inside are frustrated by the hardened factionalism and capture of key party organs by warring right-wing factions. There are too few mainstream people to coalesce with to drag the party back towards the centre.</p>
<p>Combined with the demographic changes noted by Redbridge analysts Kos Samaras and Tony Barry after the Liberals’ poor showing at the Victorian state election and federal Aston by-election, the picture for the party looks bleak.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1647379465025241088"}"></div></p>
<p>As well as losing support among women, the Liberals have lost it among young people, Samaras and Barry note. This is compounded, they say, by young people now not becoming conservative as they age: those who once would have developed into Liberal voters simply aren’t doing so.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/will-a-preoccupation-with-party-unity-destroy-the-liberal-party-203849">Will a preoccupation with party unity destroy the Liberal Party?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The Teals who won traditional blue riband Liberal seats in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth at the 2022 election are essentially moderate Liberals sitting on the crossbench, because sensible centrists are repellent to, and repelled by, the Liberal Party in its current state.</p>
<p>The entropy is gathering pace. </p>
<p>Less than a year ago, Indigenous MP Ken Wyatt was a Liberal cabinet minister before losing his seat at the 2022 election. In April this year, Wyatt resigned from the party in frustration over the Liberals’ opposition to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the co-design of which he himself commissioned and took to cabinet in the expectation of support. He was disappointed.</p>
<p>The resignation of the Dutton opposition’s Indigenous affairs spokesperson, Julian Leeser – a Voice supporter like Wyatt and a significant number of other Liberals – breaks the pattern of moderates selling their soul for career advancement. While admirable, there’s a lot less to lose taking a principled stand like this in opposition than government, but it’s a start.</p>
<p>Now <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/domino-effect-liberal-supporters-of-the-voice-preparing-formal-yes-campaign-20230414-p5d0f6.html?utm_content=top_stories&list_name=E2446F7A-1897-44FC-8EB8-B365900170E3&promote_channel=edmail&utm_campaign=am-smh-weekend&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=2023-04-16&mbnr=MzA2OTA1MDA&instance=2023-04-16-05-24-AEST&jobid=29605935">Voice-supporting Liberals are forming WhatsApp groups</a> to co-ordinate their actions in the “yes” campaign. This will likely bring them into campaigning contact with centrist Teals in those traditional blue riband seats the Liberals lost at the 2022 election.</p>
<p>Could that create a chemistry that spurs development of the Liberal Party’s next iteration? </p>
<p>Who knows? But remnant centrists inside the Liberals finding common cause with Teals and their allies outside it, campaigning if not together then at least in close proximity around a galvanising issue of national importance, does make it more rather than less likely.</p>
<p>Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s defensive posture of just appealing to “the base’” and trying to hold the Liberals together may prove the losing gambit in this fifth iteration of Australia’s main party of the centre-right. As Dutton would know from sport, purely playing defence rarely wins the game.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203654/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Wallace has received funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>Menzies created the Liberals from the rubble of its once successful but ultimately dysfunctional forebear, the UAP. It wasn’t the first time the centre-right reinvented itself. It could happen again.Chris Wallace, Professor, School of Politics Economics & Society, Faculty of Business Government & Law, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2041962023-04-27T02:01:46Z2023-04-27T02:01:46ZHell hath no fury like a former PM – but it wasn’t always so<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523109/original/file-20230427-28-2212o2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mick Tsikas/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5iCzCtPkxQ&t=269s">television interview</a> with Phillip Adams in 1999, Paul Keating remarked that he retained much influence on the international stage.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I still have most of the access […] throughout the world, in Asia in particular, that I had as prime minister.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This was a calm and contented Keating, barely three years out of office but comfortable in the knowledge his voice continued to be heard in the right quarters.</p>
<p>His <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2lQvFTmMxU">recent appearance</a> at the National Press Club to talk about the AUKUS pact between Australia, Britain and the United States (under the auspices of which Australia is purchasing up to five nuclear-powered submarines for the princely sum of $368 billion) was mostly devoid of that quality. </p>
<p>Keating called it the “worst deal in all history” and lampooned Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as the only “payer” of the pact. He was especially critical of Foreign Minister Penny Wong: “Running around the Pacific with a lei around your neck, handing out money, which is what Penny does, is not foreign policy”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z2lQvFTmMxU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>There were important and sage policy points on offer, but there was something a little unseemly about the polemic, and even more so about his complaint the prime minister’s office <a href="https://theconversation.com/paul-keating-lashes-albanese-government-over-aukus-calling-it-labors-biggest-failure-since-ww1-201866">hadn’t heeded his advice</a>. Those cognisant of Labor’s history might have been reminded of former NSW Premier Jack Lang, at whose feet Keating learned much of his politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and whose trenchant criticism of the party earned him many enemies over the decades.</p>
<p>It is easy to assume this kind of intervention is the natural corollary of losing power, egotism and what former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans called “<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-16/barnes-relevance-deprivation-syndrome-has-struck-politics/7250046">relevance deprivation syndrome</a>”. In fact, the spectre of a disgruntled former prime minister speaking out against their own party is a relatively recent one, a product of Australia’s modern, personalised political culture.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/paul-keating-lashes-albanese-government-over-aukus-calling-it-labors-biggest-failure-since-ww1-201866">Paul Keating lashes Albanese government over AUKUS, calling it Labor's biggest failure since WW1</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Death and duty</h2>
<p>In the 20th century, several of Australia’s leaders died before they could enjoy any kind of retirement in which to disrupt their successors. Alfred Deakin’s health declined rapidly in the years after he left office, preventing him from making significant contributions to public life in the years afterwards. Joe Lyons and John Curtin both died in office, as did Ben Chifley, while serving as opposition leader. Harold Holt disappeared at Cheviot Beach in December 1967.</p>
<p>The survivors, it has to be said, were put to <a href="https://theconversation.com/even-in-the-political-afterlife-morrison-departs-from-the-norm-187346">good public use</a> after leaving office. Edmund Barton served the remainder of his days on the High Court, while George Reid and Andrew Fisher both went to London to serve as Australian High Commissioner. The former even took a seat in the British House of Commons in the final years of his life.</p>
<p>Stanley Melbourne Bruce, who lost government and his own seat at the 1929 federal election, was returned to parliament in 1931 and served as a minister in Joe Lyons’ government, before emulating Reid and Fisher by serving as High Commissioner in London and going to the House of Lords. Depression-era prime minister James Scullin remained an MP for a further 18 years after losing power in 1931, reputedly offering much wise counsel to Curtin and Chifley throughout the 1940s.</p>
<p>Former prime ministers were once a little more reticent about sparring with their successors in public, especially when it came to sensitive policy matters. Fisher despaired when his successor, Billy Hughes, campaigned for military conscription in 1916. But the former prime minister used his office as High Commissioner to abstain from commenting on the referendum, which failed.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gsecEddMnis?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Robert Menzies was so disappointed with his Liberal successors, according to <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/8040279">biographer Troy Bramston</a>, that he may not have even voted for the Liberal Party in 1972, preferring the Democratic Labor Party. </p>
<p>But he would never have admitted this publicly. Instead, he used his post-prime ministerial public appearances to wax lyrical about the British Commonwealth and bemoan its declining relevance. </p>
<p>Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser consulted Menzies periodically during the party elder’s final years.</p>
<h2>Statesmen on the loose?</h2>
<p>There is a longer history, though, of former prime ministerial interventions in debates about Australia’s strategic and defence policy. These were, after all, vital questions in the 20th century. </p>
<p>When Bruce proposed in 1924 to build two new Commonwealth naval cruisers in Britain rather than Australia, his Nationalist predecessor Hughes was irate, and said so from the backbench. “Are we such spineless anaemic creatures”, he asked, “as to be incapable of bearing the great responsibilities which free government imposes upon us?”</p>
<p>Hughes would play the role of provocateur again. In 1934, he published a short book called <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1825072">The Price of Peace</a>, in which he called for a more urgent approach to preparation for conflict in the Pacific. An updated version was reissued the following year under the title Australia and the War Today, but it was highly controversial. Hughes was now a minister in a government whose foreign policy toward aggressors depended on economic sanctions, which he had described in the book as “<a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/australias-prime-ministers/william-hughes/after-office">either an empty gesture or war</a>”. His resignation promptly followed.</p>
<p>More recent interventions have taken defence policy and strategic complacency as their concern, too. A year before his death, Malcolm Fraser published a polemical book called Dangerous Allies (2014), in which he argued against Australia’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/book-review-dangerous-allies-by-malcolm-fraser-25995">bipartisan “strategic dependence”</a> on the United States.</p>
<p>Speaking on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sGk68dzsPU&t=15s">daytime television</a>, he warned that Australia’s partnership with the US could see it implicated in “major conflict” in the Pacific. He was, in this respect, equally critical of both major parties for what he perceived as subservience to American strategic interests.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/book-review-dangerous-allies-by-malcolm-fraser-25995">Book review: Dangerous Allies by Malcolm Fraser</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The AUKUS pact, in its short life, has served as the launching pad for ex-leaders other than Keating to launch powerful attacks on successors. When Scott Morrison announced the initial agreement in 2021, his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull used a <a href="https://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/address-to-the-national-press-club-september-2021">press club broadcast</a> to argue Morrison had “not acted in good faith” in reneging on the existing submarine deal with France that he, Turnbull, had signed in 2016.</p>
<p>Morrison, Turnbull fulminated, had “deceived” France. Australian voters saw the French president and their own prime minister’s immediate predecessor calling the incumbent a liar.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1612192170349592577"}"></div></p>
<h2>Fights, feuds and frustrated men</h2>
<p>In recent decades, Australians have become inured to bitter and emotional feuds between their former leaders. There are several reasons for this trend, including the increasingly personalised nature of politics since the 1970s, high rates of leadership attrition, and the thirst of media providers for easy news stories that hinge on personal animosity and Shakespearean intrigue. </p>
<p>A former leader criticising their own party is deemed the height of newsworthiness. John Howard and Julia Gillard have uniquely resisted the temptation. Howard had some <a href="https://theconversation.com/john-howard-calls-for-a-sense-of-balance-but-can-he-help-the-liberal-party-find-it-189059">stern words for his Liberal successors</a> last year in a book called A Sense of Balance, but the book appeared after the Morrison government had been defeated. Gillard, for her part, has been almost unfailingly measured and dignified in her public pronouncements since 2013. </p>
<p>For those who did return to the fray of policy combat, the personal and the political were inseparable. For much of the 1980s, Gough Whitlam was anguished by the way Hawke government ministers treated his legacy. As Jenny Hocking has shown in her <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Gough_Whitlam.html?id=QhuSmQEACAAJ&redir_esc=y">biography of Whitlam</a>, Hawke and Whitlam clashed repeatedly as the Labor Party walked away from big 1970s initiatives such as free tertiary education, an ambitious Aboriginal land rights agenda and much else. When treasurer Keating joked about the “chasm” between Whitlam’s policy aspirations and his actual achievements, Whitlam returned serve by calling him a “<a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/122414425?searchTerm=Whitlam%20Hawke%20Keating">smart-arse</a>”.</p>
<p>Where race relations and national identity have been concerned, the fall-outs between Australian ex-PMs have been that much more embittered. A great defender of refugees and asylum seekers, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/fraser-lambasts-howard-government-20040508-gdxt5o.html">Fraser spoke publicly</a> about his abhorrence of the Howard government’s approach to border protection and mandatory offshore detention. When Tony Abbott took the leadership of the Liberal Party in December 2009 promising to “stop the boats”, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-05-26/fraser-quits-liberal-party/841616">Fraser resigned his life membership</a> in protest.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was a trenchant critic of the Howard and Abbott governments’ immigration policies.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joel Carrett/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Keating’s attack on the Labor Party is not unprecedented for a former prime minister, but it isn’t historically commonplace either. There is no doubt his criticisms have been heard, but their influence remains to be seen.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204196/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua Black does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Paul Keating’s recent savage criticism of the Albanese government over the AUKUS deal is a reminder that former leaders have not always publicly disparaged their own parties.Joshua Black, PhD Candidate, School of History, National Centre of Biography, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2038492023-04-26T20:03:54Z2023-04-26T20:03:54ZWill a preoccupation with party unity destroy the Liberal Party?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522889/original/file-20230425-1294-z9ihug.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lukas Coch/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Such has been the turmoil over the Liberal Party’s recent decision to join the National Party in campaigning against the forthcoming referendum on the Voice to Parliament that even some of the most reliable supporters in the media have remarked on the internal division.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HysJuSiSyVw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>But is the Liberal Party really “divided like never before”? Such assertions can scarcely stand if we have regard for history. </p>
<p>The original Liberal Party was created from a fusion of the Protectionist and Free Trade parties in 1910. It was officially named the Liberal Party, with Alfred Deakin as its leader, in 1913. It was reformed twice before the second world war, first in 1916 as the National Party (led by Labor renegade Billy Hughes), and then in 1931 as the United Australia Party (UAP), led by another Labor deserter, Joseph Lyons. In 1941, the UAP, now led by Robert Menzies, was defeated on the floor of parliament.</p>
<p>Division and realignment were elemental anti-Labor politics until the 1940s, as former implacable foes were marshaled to capitalise on opportunities created by turmoil within the Labor Party. The latter was rocked by Hughes and his supporters decamping to the other side during the first world war and shattered again by its defeat during the Depression. </p>
<p>Yet there was policy laziness within the UAP as war threatened. Lyons “knew how to win elections” said former National Party prime minister, Stanley Bruce, but was bereft of policy initiative and struggled to maintain party discipline. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522899/original/file-20230426-28-38efal.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522899/original/file-20230426-28-38efal.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522899/original/file-20230426-28-38efal.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522899/original/file-20230426-28-38efal.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522899/original/file-20230426-28-38efal.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522899/original/file-20230426-28-38efal.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522899/original/file-20230426-28-38efal.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joseph Lyons ‘knew how to win elections’ said Stanley Bruce, but struggled to maintain party discipline.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Archives of Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The defeat of the UAP in 1941 was arguably the most consequential collapse we have seen in anti-Labor forces. It would take wholesale party reform and a revitalisation of the liberal message, led by Robert Menzies, for it to re-emerge as the Liberal Party that won government in 1949 and held office for 23 years.</p>
<p>Is current intra-party contention of a scale that saw the implosion of the UAP and the creation of the modern Liberal Party? Surely not, or not yet. Peter Dutton has provoked acrimonious debate with his opposition to the Voice to parliament. He has also suffered a substantial loss of support in the polls, from an already low base.</p>
<p>But to date, a majority of his party colleagues support his position, it is likely branch members do too.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-does-the-liberal-partys-voice-policy-stack-up-against-the-proposed-referendum-203352">How does the Liberal Party's Voice policy stack up against the proposed referendum?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>More recent Liberal divisions over policy offer further grounds for comparison. The republic issue, championed by Labor prime minister Paul Keating in the 1990s, looked likely to cause division with the Liberal Party. While Howard was a dyed-in-the-wool monarchist, his shadow Cabinet included well-known republicans, Peter Costello, Robert Hill, Richard Alston and Peter Reith. </p>
<p>During the 1996 election campaign, Howard undertook to hold a constitutional convention on the republic if he won the prime ministership. If that convention reached a consensus about a model, Howard would take it to referendum, which is what happened in 1999. Recognising the differing views within his party, the prime minister allowed Liberal parliamentarians a free vote on the republic, but was pleased when the referendum, against which he campaigned enthusiastically, failed. </p>
<p>Despite clear ideological differences, the republic issue never seriously threatened party unity. Indeed, Howard used the occasion to underline, as he often did, that the Liberal Party was a “broad church”. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rNM3iyCH4do?wmode=transparent&start=16" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Malcolm Turnbull’s drawn out, and fruitless attempt in 2018 to introduce a National Energy Guarantee (NEG) – which destroyed his authority and precipitated a spill in which Scott Morrison seized the leadership – provides further lessons for the Liberal Party. </p>
<p>Turnbull, attempting a solution with the NEG that would satisfy business, investors and most of the public, could not withstand the relentless opposition of the party’s right to every progressive initiative. His was not only a moderate and science-based response to a manifest problem, but also a solution that appeared likely to win public support. But Turnbull was unable to deliver what many wanted because he was unable to contain the internal battles within the party room.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-a-shocker-performance-even-by-coup-standards-102131">View from The Hill: A shocker performance, even by coup standards</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This was division more profound than anything we’ve seen yet in the current Coalition. Morrison was able to contain that division by promising to “win the vote”. He succeeded in this in 2019, not by proposing policy innovation, but by an effective negation of everything that Labor, under Bill Shorten, proposed. Having won the “miracle” election, he presided over a period of government and governance failure that led to Coalition defeat in 2022. </p>
<p>The 2022 performance was so bad that even <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/friendly-fire-john-howards-stinging-critique-of-the-morrison-government/news-story/8d57a9704f2eaa9f0df0d53fd68bffea">Howard conceded</a> that “the absence of a program for the future […] the absence of some kind of manifesto, hurt us very badly”. </p>
<p>However, in the months since, Dutton has failed to craft a new liberal message that has wider electoral appeal. Instead, he has persisted with a conservative and highly oppositional approach, such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/feb/08/peter-dutton-warns-liberal-moderates-to-vote-against-labors-safeguard-mechanism-overhaul">the Coalition’s opposition</a> to Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target and the safeguard mechanism. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-will-have-a-carbon-price-for-industry-and-it-may-infuse-greater-climate-action-across-the-economy-202728">Australia will have a carbon price for industry – and it may infuse greater climate action across the economy</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This recourse to negativity and fearmongering, employed with electoral success by Tony Abbott in 2013 and Morrison in 2019, is once more to the fore in Dutton’s resort to questions and division rather than positive engagement with the Voice. It can also be seen in spurious assertions such as Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley’s recent claim that if the Voice referendum is successful, the new mechanism could be used to veto Anzac Day.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1646727360098746368"}"></div></p>
<p>These oppositional policy stances might maintain party unity and please the membership, but they fail to recognise fundamental problems. Australian electoral politics is undergoing significant realignment. Women and migrants have deserted the Coalition, the concerns of younger Australians about climate change, housing affordability and wealth inequality are registering in voting patterns, and mainstream opinion still inclines to supporting the Voice. </p>
<p>Given the 2022 election result and polling trends since, the only rationale for the Coalition to persist with its oppositional approach is a commitment to its small and unrepresentative base.</p>
<p>There are three things any leader must do. The first is to hold the party together, and this Dutton – aware of Turnbull’s fate – is doing. It will not be enough: social and demographic change are against him. If it is faithful to its members, the party will be destroyed at the ballot box.</p>
<p>The second is to respond to changing circumstances, recruiting an enlarged membership and persuading the party to adopt a constructive policy agenda to suit contemporary conditions. This is where Menzies, and arguably Howard, succeeded. </p>
<p>The third is to successfully communicate its policy purposes to a broad constituency by explaining how they will serve the principal public concerns of the moment. Menzies’ recognition in his time of the need for a revitalised liberalism, and now Howard’s call for a manifesto for the future recognise this. </p>
<p>If the Liberal Party cannot craft a positive message of liberalism that is attuned to the mainstream concerns of today’s electorate, a fate like that of the UAP is inevitable.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203849/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carolyn Holbrook receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is on the executive committee of the Australian Historical Association.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Walter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There are lessons from history in how to hold the Liberal Party together – and it’s about more than just opposing everything the government does.Carolyn Holbrook, Senior Lecturer in History, Deakin UniversityJames Walter, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2036602023-04-14T04:37:25Z2023-04-14T04:37:25ZDutton’s ‘no’ vote reflects 40 years of Coalition partisanship on the Voice<p>Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s hope for a bipartisan approach on the Voice to parliament referendum has crumbled.</p>
<p>Late last year, the National party declared it would oppose the proposed model, while the Liberal party did the same earlier this month. </p>
<p>Nationals Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price <a href="https://theconversation.com/nationals-declare-they-will-oppose-the-voice-referendum-195446">said</a> the current Voice model “lacks detail”, “divides us along the lines of race”, and that it’s “a way to push people into feeling guilt for our nation’s history”.</p>
<p>And Opposition Leader Peter Dutton <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/apr/05/peter-dutton-confirms-liberals-will-oppose-indigenous-voice-to-parliament">said</a> “it is divisive and won’t deliver the outcomes to people on the ground”.</p>
<p>If these words sound familiar, that’s because in the late 1980s, the Coalition used the same arguments to oppose the creation of another First Nations advisory body, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC).</p>
<p>Indeed, the Coalition has a long-held opposition to an empowered Indigenous advisory body, and Dutton is parroting a well-rehearsed Coalition songbook. </p>
<h2>The Coalition’s battle against ATSIC</h2>
<p>Over the past 40 years, cooperation between the major parties on Indigenous affairs has been a complicated matter.</p>
<p>Even the ostensibly bipartisan approach to the 1967 referendum – which succeeded in altering the constitution to enable the Commonwealth to make laws for Indigenous people – concealed partisan differences.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-1967-referendum-was-the-most-successful-in-australias-history-but-what-it-can-tell-us-about-2023-is-complicated-198874">The 1967 referendum was the most successful in Australia's history. But what it can tell us about 2023 is complicated</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Gough Whitlam’s policy of self-determination became self-management under the Coalition in the late 1970s. Bipartisanship deteriorated further in the late 1980s after the Aboriginal affairs minister in the Hawke Labor government, Gerry Hand, announced the need to recognise and legislate Aboriginal self-determination.</p>
<p>Hand’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) Bill would establish a national commission and regional councils across the country to monitor programs, develop policy and advise the minister. This was styled as a revolution in Aboriginal affairs. </p>
<p>In the 40 hours of parliamentary debates over the bill, clear ideological lines were drawn.</p>
<p>Hand said it was about giving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people access to all levels of government to ensure the right decisions were made about their lives. It was about a new partnership and an attempt to right the wrongs of history.</p>
<p>Opposing it, the Coalition argued it would <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fhansardr%2F1989-04-11%2F0025%22">divide the nation</a> rather than unite it, that it constituted a “black parliament”, that it was a racial law, and that it would not overcome Indigenous disadvantage. </p>
<p>The Liberals and Nationals rejected what they <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fhansardr%2F1989-04-11%2F0028%22">called</a> the “symbolism, separatism and perpetual guilt” of the appeal to history.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1643539561354760194"}"></div></p>
<p>But it was Hand’s suggested preamble that worried the Coalition most. It acknowledged the distinct status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as prior occupants and original owners of the land. It aimed to provide them with:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>full recognition and status within the Australian nation to which history, their prior ownership and occupation of the land, and their rich and diverse culture, fully entitle them to aspire.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The parliamentary debates reveal the Coalition’s visceral rejection of the preamble, which it <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fhansards%2F1989-08-30%2F0038%22">called</a> a “gross irresponsibility”.</p>
<p>In 1989, then MP John Howard <a href="https://www.vinnies.org.au/icms_docs/168244_2004_Ozanam_Lecture_-_Thursday_20_May_2004.pdf">declared</a> the establishment of ATSIC an act of “sheer national idiocy”. Shadow Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Christopher Miles declared his party’s <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fhansardr%2F1989-05-23%2F0119%22">intention to abolish ATSIC</a> if it proceeded as Hand had envisaged.</p>
<p>When the ATSIC bill finally passed, it was stripped of the preamble, and self-determination had been removed from its wording. </p>
<h2>What’s happened since ATSIC?</h2>
<p>As it turns out, the abolition of ATSIC became a bipartisan affair. In 2004, Prime Minister Howard declared the ATSIC Act <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/howard-puts-atsic-to-death-20040416-gdxoqw.html">would be repealed</a>, after Labor leader Mark Latham announced his decision to do the same if elected to office. Latham suggested a reconstituted body, but Howard declared no intention of replacing it.</p>
<p>While there has been <a href="https://theconversation.com/northern-territory-intervention-extended-but-is-it-working-8005">some cooperation</a> on Indigenous policy since, bipartisanship around an advisory body has been a slippery proposition.</p>
<p>Disagreements emerged in 2017 when Labor backed the Referendum Council’s recommendation of a constitutionally enshrined Voice to parliament. Then Liberal leader, Malcolm Turnbull, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/oct/26/indigenous-voice-proposal-not-desirable-says-turnbull">rejected it</a>.</p>
<p>Bipartisanship cropped up again when Liberal and Labor leaders <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/turnbull-and-shorten-agree-on-restart-for-indigenous-referendum-20180301-p4z2eb.html">agreed in 2018 to a restart on the referendum</a> through a parliamentary committee, to find common ground on Indigenous recognition. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1640821535274303488"}"></div></p>
<p>Given this history, it’s not surprising two of the main sticking points for the Coalition around the Voice proposal are that it will be permanent, and that it will have a voice to parliament and the executive (the cabinet and government departments).</p>
<p>The last time an Indigenous body advised the executive was when the Keating government sought to legislate native title following the Mabo decision. ATSIC mobilised a large group of Indigenous organisations to present their case to Keating’s <a href="https://www.roberttickner.com/taking-a-stand">Mabo Ministerial Committee</a>.</p>
<p>Then, in a series of intense negotiations with Keating following his draft native title bill in 1993, they salvaged some rights in the face of their near extinguishment.</p>
<p>The resulting Native Title Act was declared by the then Liberal leader, John Hewson, <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/127525273?searchTerm=millstone%20around%20our%20country%27s%20prosperity">as a</a> “millstone around our country’s prosperity” and a recipe for division.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-the-high-cost-of-the-liberals-voice-rejection-for-both-peter-dutton-and-the-party-203419">Grattan on Friday: the high cost of the Liberals' Voice rejection – for both Peter Dutton and the party</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This week, Howard resurfaced to <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/indigenous-voice-john-howard-denounces-noel-pearsons-judas-attack-on-peter-dutton/news-story/3aa749e59860d1a3f9602f1bfdc66fa1">defend Dutton’s position</a> on the Voice referendum, declaring Dutton had not betrayed the Liberal party.</p>
<p>Howard was speaking a truth – the Coalition’s position on the Voice is entirely consistent with their partisanship in this area of Aboriginal policy since the 1980s.</p>
<p>Everything they now argue to support their “no” vote to the Voice they have long maintained.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203660/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alison Holland receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DP230100714 - Policy for Self-Determination: the Case Study of ATSIC) with Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt, Associate Professor Daryl Rigney, Dr Kirsten Thorpe and Lindon Coombes. </span></em></p>The Coalition’s position on the Voice is entirely consistent with their partisanship in this area of Aboriginal policy since the 1980s.Alison Holland, Associate Professor, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1994152023-03-19T19:04:30Z2023-03-19T19:04:30Z‘We did it so badly … it’s now backfired’: women and minority US forces reflect on the invasion of Iraq – now 20 years ago<p>Twenty years ago, the United States led the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq_war)#:%7E:text=The%20term%20coalition%20of%20the,led%20by%20the%20United%20States.">coalition of the willing</a>” in an invasion of Iraq, in the shadow of the September 11 2001 attacks on the US by militant Islamic network <a href="https://theconversation.com/understanding-islamic-state-where-does-it-come-from-and-what-does-it-want-52155">al-Qaeda</a>. </p>
<p>Western forces justified the war by <a href="https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html">claiming</a> Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (which would never be found) and intended to help al-Qaeda. </p>
<p>A long, drawn-out war created a power vacuum in Iraq, leading to civil war between Iraqi Shias and Sunnis, and repeated insurgencies against occupying forces. Both were exploited by the emerging militant terror group Daesh, better known as ISIS, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story">whose leaders</a> met and radicalised in US detention camps. </p>
<p>While most Western forces finally withdrew in 2017, <a href="https://www.iraqbodycount.org/">Iraq faces</a> continued insurgency and political crises. </p>
<p>“The people that we chose – and the people we empowered – were leaders of ethnic or religious extremists,” reflected Lieutenant Heather Coyne, as early as 2004. “We made them, we put them in charge.”</p>
<p>Coyne was one of the US military members and contractors whose experiences of the invasion were captured by the <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/2005/10/oral-histories-iraq-experience-project">“Iraq Experience” Oral History Project</a>. It reveals a snapshot of Iraq at a key moment in time: just over a year after the war began.</p>
<h2>Culturally diverse armed forces</h2>
<p>The soldier-force Western militaries deployed to fight the War on Terror was the most diverse in history: providing language skills, cultural competencies and the ability to communicate with local women. It was also a <a href="https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/diversity-as-power/">representational device</a>, reflecting the invading forces’ rhetoric of pluralism, tolerance and equality. </p>
<p>Yet these soldiers waged a deeply racialised and gendered war. </p>
<p>Military policies around “collateral damage” and “enemy combatants” dehumanised enemies, allies, and civilians alike. Common threads of religious humiliation, sexual violence and racism run through reports of soldiers’ conduct. Allegations of war crimes by Western forces bear the hallmarks <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-soldiers-commit-war-crimes-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-185391">of white male supremacy</a>. Women and minority soldiers faced <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/get-a-weapon/596677/">epidemics of sexual violence</a> and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-29/racism2c-sexism-rife-on-adf-facebook-group/3860736">racism</a> within Western military institutions.</p>
<p>I’m researching the experiences of women and minority soldiers deployed with US, UK and Australian militaries in the war on terror. In the project’s first stage, I read through existing archives of interviews with veterans.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.usip.org/">Institute of Peace</a> think tank conducted <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/2005/10/oral-histories-iraq-experience-project">interviews</a> with military and contractors between June and November 2004 for a “<a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/2005/10/oral-histories-iraq-experience-project">lessons learned” project</a>.</p>
<p>Six of the 35 interviewees met my criteria: three women (all white) and three men: one Navajo, one African American, and one Iraqi expatriate. Half had military experience; the three civilians all had expertise in conflict management.</p>
<p>The interviewees were proud of their mission and buoyed by hopes for the <a href="https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/b287848e17874c0a8d65849e64af4566">upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections</a>. </p>
<p>Yet underneath this confidence were deep anxieties.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-soldiers-commit-war-crimes-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-185391">Friday essay: why soldiers commit war crimes – and what we can do about it</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Good guys or bad guys?</h2>
<p>Navajo marine veteran Eric Bauer connected with Iraqis similarly to how he’d connect with other Native Americans: talking about relationships, family and community rather than resumes. By doing this, he explained, “they knew who I was as a person, and vice versa”. </p>
<p>Bauer was tasked with the practical process of setting up councils in Baghdad. He had to figure out if those who wanted to serve as representatives were, in his words, “good guys or bad guys”. In practice, this was “just getting people to talk about themselves”, often for hours. </p>
<p>One major struggle for the occupying forces was the problem of governance: how to create a new Iraqi political system that was representative, cooperative, friendly to Western allies, and had popular support. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515033/original/file-20230313-2482-4q89zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515033/original/file-20230313-2482-4q89zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515033/original/file-20230313-2482-4q89zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515033/original/file-20230313-2482-4q89zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515033/original/file-20230313-2482-4q89zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515033/original/file-20230313-2482-4q89zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515033/original/file-20230313-2482-4q89zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515033/original/file-20230313-2482-4q89zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eric Bauer was tasked with figuring out if potential council representatives were ‘good guys or bad guys’ – which involved talking to them for hours.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jerome Delay/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The first step in this process was “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/30/internationaleducationnews.iraq">de-Ba’athification</a>”, a policy of removing any members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party from positions of power. The Iraqi Army was disbanded and public sector employees affiliated with the Ba’ath party were removed and banned from future employment. Once the old system was removed, the US attempted to build one anew. </p>
<p>Interviewing so many Iraqis helped Bauer understand the holes in the policy of de-Ba’athification:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>if you wanted a job that was, let’s say a teacher or a doctor within the government […] you would take active part in furthering the goals of the Baath party, or at least swear allegiance to them now […] technically then, we would have to dismiss all schoolteachers. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But this empathy for the struggle to survive clashed with his view that the Ba’ath party were fundamentally evil, and by extension those who cooperated were the same: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>for a lot of them it was a way to get by. If you didn’t have a moral conscience you would do it. Like I said, they weren’t loyal to the principles of it.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Failures of reconstruction</h2>
<p>Denise Dauphinais worked for USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives. As a civilian with foreign policy expertise, she was critical of how the US military handled – or neglected – seemingly obvious tasks such as clearing rubble, preventing looting, and making the cities feel safe and liveable.</p>
<p>Electricity supply was another major problem. The US administration had believed an oil-rich country would quickly become self-sufficient, providing energy supply throughout Iraq – along with the revenue to fund the ongoing US occupation. </p>
<p>In reality, years of prewar US sanctions had <a href="https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/report/57jqap.htm">crippled Iraqi infrastructure</a>, which was then bombarded in the invasion itself. Months into the occupation, the occupying forces were unable to provide electricity and other basic services.</p>
<p>Lieutenant Heather Coyne had worked on terrorism and conflict management for the White House and spoke Arabic proficiently. She worked in civil affairs in Iraq, for the Coalition Provisional Authority, where she used her language skills to connect with locals and hear their stories. By the summer of 2003, two months after the invasion,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…people were not only miserable because it was hot, but because food was spoiling. You could only buy a certain amount of food because they couldn’t count on their refrigerators working. It created such destruction in their lives.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515043/original/file-20230314-24-82uh3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515043/original/file-20230314-24-82uh3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515043/original/file-20230314-24-82uh3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515043/original/file-20230314-24-82uh3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515043/original/file-20230314-24-82uh3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515043/original/file-20230314-24-82uh3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515043/original/file-20230314-24-82uh3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515043/original/file-20230314-24-82uh3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The US military neglected seemingly obvious tasks such as preventing looting. Here, a Baghdad shopkeeper bricks up his shop to protect it.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jerome Delay/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fifteen-years-after-looting-thousands-of-artefacts-are-still-missing-from-iraqs-national-museum-93949">Fifteen years after looting, thousands of artefacts are still missing from Iraq's national museum</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘We put them in charge’</h2>
<p>The US was determined to prevent concentration of power by any one group, so they allocated different offices to the parties representing different ethnic and religious groups. But the result was a <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/4/muhasasa-the-political-system-reviled-by-iraqi-protesters">system of quotas that fostered sectarian conflict between those groups</a>, as potential leaders traded on identity to consolidate their power bases. </p>
<p>Bauer, who worked on setting up these councils, was very defensive of the quota system: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>we carefully structured the councils to ensure that there was diversity in the representation because otherwise there would not have been […] People say, “well, that’s not a democracy”. No, it’s a republic trying to get fair representation, not just mob rule.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But Coyne, who was lower down the ladder, pointed out that the occupying forces had empowered extremists.</p>
<p>The civil war between Shia and Sunni militias that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/28/iraq1">emerged in Iraq from 2006</a> was one legacy of the new sectarian political system. So were the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-49960677">waves of protests</a> calling for political reform in 2019-2021.</p>
<p>Coyne found the emphasis on equality and representation ironic, even hypocritical. She remembered sneaking into a meeting with military commanders who were insisting more women be represented in local council: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the commanding general was pounding the table, “we absolutely need more women in these councils.” […] Around the table, nods of agreement, shaking heads, absolutely this is incredibly important. I looked around the room, of 40 people in the room I was the only female and I wasn’t really supposed to be there in the first place […] they’re going around telling the Iraqis you need to elect more women and the Iraqis look at [Americans] and see only men.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Loss of legitimacy and growing insurgency</h2>
<p>This ongoing US interference in supposedly Iraqi democratic institutions meant a loss of legitimacy. As a result, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2004/10/25/clerics-threaten-election-boycott">several moderate</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/dec/28/iraq.michaelhoward">Sunni groups boycotted</a> the 2005 parliamentary elections.</p>
<p>Lack of trust in the new local authorities, combined with the effects of de-Ba’athification, propelled the growing insurgency. </p>
<p>Munthir Nalu was an Iraqi expatriate who fled Iraq in 1991 and was recruited into the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council, an advisory body of Iraqi experts assisting the US Defence Department. </p>
<p>Nalu was highly critical of the decision to disband the Iraqi Army: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have many, many friends in the former Iraqi army, and they were crying. They said, please, find us a solution, we have nothing. We are sitting home with no salaries, nothing … those opposition, they are fighting against us and against United States Army and the coalition, most of them from the Iraqi army.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The thousands of newly unemployed men of fighting age were then attracted by sectarian militias, established by newly empowered leaders such <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/may/25/iraq">Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr</a>.</p>
<h2>Increasingly dangerous</h2>
<p>Iraq felt increasingly dangerous, the interviewees reported. Many were concerned about the influx of foreign fighters across the borders, and increased attacks on anyone associated with the occupying forces. </p>
<p>Bauer felt lucky he was still able to move freely, because of his Navajo looks: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>in Baghdad, the city is pretty diverse. I would go to the restaurants and shopping markets in the city and I never got a second look.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Still, he acknowledged </p>
<blockquote>
<p>pretty much everybody that was involved, I mean in any way involved with the Coalition […] you were a legitimate target.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The interviewees were aware the US had fostered the sense of insecurity within the country. But they still felt the Iraqis, not the US, were ultimately responsible for Iraqi security. They failed to see the links between the US presence and the lack of security. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515036/original/file-20230313-26-t4riys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515036/original/file-20230313-26-t4riys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515036/original/file-20230313-26-t4riys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515036/original/file-20230313-26-t4riys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515036/original/file-20230313-26-t4riys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515036/original/file-20230313-26-t4riys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515036/original/file-20230313-26-t4riys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515036/original/file-20230313-26-t4riys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The US soldiers interviewed in 2004 failed to see the links between the US presence and the lack of security.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tony Nicoletti/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/as-a-patriot-and-black-man-colin-powell-embodied-the-two-ness-of-the-african-american-experience-170168">As a patriot and Black man, Colin Powell embodied the 'two-ness' of the African American experience</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What was the real goal?</h2>
<p>The weapons of mass destruction – the stated justification for the war – were almost absent from the Iraq Experience interviews, because in late 2004, it was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/oct/07/usa.iraq1">already apparent</a> they didn’t exist.</p>
<p>Only Bauer mentioned them, and only briefly, stating: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>he had them. I met the people that said he had them and I believe them. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Instead, the interviewees focused on two interlinked justifications for the war: removing a tyrant from power, and spreading democracy. </p>
<p>The Institute of Peace clearly selected interviewees that share the US government’s ideological views. In the next phase of my project, I aim to interview women and minorities with a much broader range of experiences, including those who have become critical of the War on Terror as <a href="https://aboutfaceveterans.org/who-we-are/">a result of their service</a>.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, these interviews from 2004 foreshadow the next 20 years of Iraq’s history. The interviewees accurately predicted the US would remain involved in Iraq for the next few decades. Despite their belief in the mission, they were not convinced of their success.</p>
<p>“I still think it was the right thing to do,” Coyne admitted, “but we did it so badly that it’s now backfired.”</p>
<p>What should they have done differently? The answer seems to be: everything. These interviews call into question the entire concept of a foreign military undertaking the mission of “nation-building”.</p>
<p>Twenty years later, perhaps the most prescient warning comes from Dauphinais: “the best that we can hope for [is that] the Iraqis will forgive us.”</p>
<hr>
<p><em>All quotations are from the interview transcripts available on the <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/2005/10/oral-histories-iraq-experience-project">Institute of Peace “Iraq Experience” Oral History Project</a> website.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199415/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mia Martin Hobbs received funding for this research from the Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry at ANU, and the Centre for Contemporary Histories at Deakin University</span></em></p>The beginnings of Iraq’s sectarian civil war, the failures of its US-built political system, and the struggle for civilians attempting to survive chaos and violence are here in these 2004 interviews.Mia Martin Hobbs, Research Fellow, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1959162023-01-01T00:15:56Z2023-01-01T00:15:56ZTampa, Bali bombings, 9/11 and the Kyoto Protocol: today’s cabinet paper release shows what worried Australia in 2002<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499693/original/file-20221208-20-33blyu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2326%2C1555&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">NAA: A14482, 020309DI-03 AUSPIC/Photographer Peter West</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Every year, the National Archives of Australia releases the cabinet records from 20 years earlier, and this year’s batch is out today. </p>
<p>This release, from the cabinet records of 2002, is framed by two events of the previous year. </p>
<p>The first took place in August 2001, when Australian troops boarded a Norwegian ship, MV Tampa, carrying more than 400 rescued asylum seekers. </p>
<p>The Howard government quickly introduced legislation to forbid “unauthorised arrivals” from landing on the Australian mainland. It also determined that those arriving by boat would be processed offshore.</p>
<p>The second event of 2001 was the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the US mainland on September 11. These attacks ushered in <a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/cabinet/latest-cabinet-release/2001-cabinet-papers-context">a new securitised era</a> in global and Australian politics that has lasted to the present day. They also led to two wars in which Australia participated. The first, in Afghanistan, lasted from 2001 until 2022. The second, the intervention by the “coalition of the willing” in Iraq, was launched in 2003 following decisions in Washington in 2002.</p>
<p>The two events of 2001, the Tampa and 9/11, overwhelmed Labor’s campaign and contributed to the third consecutive victory of the Coalition parties in the federal election held in November that year.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499701/original/file-20221208-20-jbhhtw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Howard government cabinet at Parliament House in 2002." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499701/original/file-20221208-20-jbhhtw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499701/original/file-20221208-20-jbhhtw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499701/original/file-20221208-20-jbhhtw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499701/original/file-20221208-20-jbhhtw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499701/original/file-20221208-20-jbhhtw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499701/original/file-20221208-20-jbhhtw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499701/original/file-20221208-20-jbhhtw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Howard government cabinet at Parliament House in 2002.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NAA: A14482, 020470-13a AUSPIC/Photographer David Foote</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-the-mv-tampa-and-the-transformation-of-asylum-seeker-policy-74078">Australian politics explainer: the MV Tampa and the transformation of asylum-seeker policy</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The ‘Pacific Solution’ and immigration</h2>
<p>Many of the cabinet records of 2002 relate to the Howard government’s continuation of its “Pacific Solution”. </p>
<p>They include offshore processing in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, building a new immigration detention facility on Christmas Island, and revamping immigration centres on the mainland. </p>
<p>A conference in Indonesia in February 2002 led to the “Bali Process”, an official international forum to facilitate discussion and information-sharing on issues related to people-smuggling.</p>
<p>Other papers relate to Australia’s normal immigration program, which included a “special humanitarian program” for refugees not coming by boat. </p>
<p>Thus, refugees attempting to come by boat were excluded. But others who were lucky to be plucked from refugee camps around the world prospered. </p>
<p><a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/30/australia-soccer-qatar-world-cup-team-refugee-policy/">Four of the 2022 World Cup Socceroos squad</a> were born in Africa and three were refugees who entered Australia under the special humanitarian program. Defender Thomas Deng, for example, was born in Kenya to parents who had fled Sudan and moved to Australia in 2003. </p>
<h2>National security</h2>
<p>Other highlights of the cabinet papers relate to national security, foreign policy, defence and counter-terrorism. </p>
<p>The emblematic moment of 2002 came tragically for Australia on October 12, when the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group detonated a bomb in the tourist district of Bali. More than 200 people were killed, 88 Australians <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/bali-bombings">among them</a>. Two short cabinet minutes of oral reports to cabinet refer to the enormous amount of work done by agencies, particularly the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, in the Bali crisis.</p>
<p>Other papers relate to peace-keeping operations in trouble spots in the region, including East Timor, Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. The operation in the last was an overture to the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, launched in 2003.</p>
<p>There are many submissions from Defence Minister Robert Hill on the defence program and acquisitions. This was was the year Hill made the <a href="https://kokodafoundation.wildapricot.org/resources/Documents/Reid%20Hutchins%20-%20What%20was%20the%20%27Defence%20of%20Australia%27%20strategic%20policy.pdf">strongest official criticism</a> yet of the “Defence of Australia” strategy that had governed Australian defence policy since the 1980s.</p>
<p>Hill presaged a new direction for strategy when he <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/when-defence-goes-around-in-circles-20020716-gdfgdf.html">remarked</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It probably never made sense to conceptualise our security interests as a series of diminishing concentric circles around our coastline, but it certainly does not do so now. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The strategic debate in which Hill engaged in 2002 <a href="https://www.defence.gov.au/about/reviews-inquiries/defence-strategic-review">continues</a> vigorously 20 years later. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-bali-bombings-transformed-our-relations-with-indonesia-192011">How the Bali bombings transformed our relations with Indonesia</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Climate change, the environment and heritage</h2>
<p>Issues relating to climate change, the environment and heritage occupy as prominent a place in Howard’s 2002 cabinet as they do today. </p>
<p>Critically, following the lead of US President George W. Bush, cabinet decided not to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. </p>
<p>The European Union and Japan ratified the protocol in 2002. But it was not until 2005, after ratification by Russia and Canada, that the protocol came into effect. Australia’s cabinet accepted advice not to burden its emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries by accepting commitments not also accepted by competitors.</p>
<p>The decision not to ratify in 2002 was <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-wars-carbon-taxes-and-toppled-leaders-the-30-year-history-of-australias-climate-response-in-brief-169545">symbolic</a> of Australia’s failure to sustain a meaningful climate change regime in the years up to 2022.</p>
<h2>Transport and social and economic policy</h2>
<p>Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson made several submissions on transport and regional policy. In one, cabinet decided not to proceed with a proposal for a very-high-speed rail network between Brisbane and Melbourne on economic grounds. Now, 20 years later, the Albanese government has <a href="https://minister.infrastructure.gov.au/c-king/media-release/high-speed-rail-gathers-speed">reversed</a> the decision.</p>
<p>Communications Minister Richard Alston obtained cabinet approval for a package of significant <a href="https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article/the-sad-history-of-australian-media-reform">media reforms</a> with detrimental consequences for Australia’s media diversity. These could not, however, be implemented until after 2004 when the coalition parties gained control of the Senate. </p>
<p>Many other submissions relate to economic policy, including the first <a href="https://treasury.gov.au/intergenerational-report">Integenerational report</a>, welfare policy, health policy and agreements with the states on matters such as housing.</p>
<h2>Indigenous policy</h2>
<p>The release includes important submissions on Indigenous policy. </p>
<p>One approved a review of the operation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission, a body established under Hawke and dissolved in 2005. </p>
<p>In another, the government decided not to proceed with recommendations of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, including for a treaty and recognition of Indigenous people in a new preamble to the Constitution. </p>
<p>In 2007, just before its defeat, however, Howard <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/asia/11iht-australia.1.7848215.html">changed his mind</a>, at least on the Constitutional question.</p>
<p>Arguably, Howard’s 2007 change of mind was an important step in the current process towards a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous <a href="https://spectator.com.au/2021/08/why-conservatives-should-support-an-indigenous-voice-to-parliament/">Voice to Parliament</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499703/original/file-20221208-16-zjb51s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Indigenous Education Ambassadors Michael O’Loughlin (left) and Reverend Shayne Blackman (centre) meet with Dr Brendan Nelson to discuss the National Indigenous English Literacy and Numeracy Strategy in 2002." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499703/original/file-20221208-16-zjb51s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499703/original/file-20221208-16-zjb51s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499703/original/file-20221208-16-zjb51s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499703/original/file-20221208-16-zjb51s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499703/original/file-20221208-16-zjb51s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499703/original/file-20221208-16-zjb51s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499703/original/file-20221208-16-zjb51s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Indigenous Education Ambassadors Michael O’Loughlin (left) and Reverend Shayne Blackman (centre) meet with Dr Brendan Nelson to discuss the National Indigenous.
English Literacy and Numeracy Strategy in 2002.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NAA: 14482, 020239DI-004 AUSPIC/Photographer David Foote</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Inclusions and omissions</h2>
<p>Not every subject came to cabinet and some are only referenced by short minutes or oral presentations by ministers. </p>
<p>There is no submission, for example, on Howard’s finalisation of a A$25 billion <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/how-australia-blew-its-future-gas-supplies-20170928-gyqg0f.html">natural gas deal</a> to China. In this, Howard took an important step in the evolving trade relationship with China. </p>
<p>But 20 years later, the Australian people are suffering from failure by the Commonwealth and the states to establish a <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-gas-trigger-wont-be-enough-to-stop-our-energy-crisis-escalating-we-need-a-domestic-reservation-policy-188057">gas reservation policy</a> on Australia’s east coast.</p>
<p>Likewise, there is only a short minute on <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/history-delivers-howard-some-heady-moments-20020615-gduaxm.html">Howard’s discussions with Bush</a> in June 2002 and too little to indicate what significance they may have had to the subsequent intervention in Iraq.</p>
<p>Cabinet records are only the top of a pyramid. Records of individual agencies (which may be requested by individual researchers separately after 20 years) are equally important to the historical record. </p>
<p>This makes it imperative for the the National Archives to be adequately resourced to carry out its essential role as the <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/national-archives-gets-money-to-save-decaying-documents-20210701-p585rx.html">custodian of the records</a> of the Australian people.</p>
<p>To that end, discontinuing the efficiency dividend on the National Archives and other struggling cultural institutions would be a <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-good-is-a-new-national-cultural-policy-without-history-188741">welcome start</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cabinet-papers-1994-95-keatings-climate-policy-grapples-sound-eerily-familiar-89490">Cabinet papers 1994-95: Keating's climate policy grapples sound eerily familiar</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195916/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Funding from the National Archives of Australia to David Lee in the role of Cabinet historian in 2022 is being made to the research funds of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Canberra.
David Lee is a member of the Australian Labor Party. </span></em></p>This year’s release, from the cabinet records of 2002, is framed by two events of the previous year: the Tampa affair and 9/11.David Lee, Associate Professor of History, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1890592022-08-30T20:04:54Z2022-08-30T20:04:54ZJohn Howard calls for ‘a sense of balance’, but can he help the Liberal Party find it?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481548/original/file-20220829-14-rsube3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mick Tsikas/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When stories about former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s secret ministerial roles emerged, John Howard was called on by <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-16/john-howard-says-scott-morrison-should-remain-in-parliament/101339690">all</a> and <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/morrisons-mistake-not-a-hanging-offence-howard/video/67106d18284290f25cfcde8d37c71506">sundry</a> for comment. For some, Howard represents stability, convention and commonsense liberalism, a Menzies in our own time. (<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781743097977/the-menzies-era/">It is a parallel</a> Howard has carefully cultivated).</p>
<p>But as it happened, Howard was available for comment (reluctantly, it seemed) because he was out promoting his new book, <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460762622/a-sense-of-balance/">A Sense of Balance</a>, published with HarperCollins Australia. That book offers Howard a powerful platform on which to speak about contemporary politics, national identity, and the state of the modern Liberal Party.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o9kOS3rmZfM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Balancing act</h2>
<p>The essence of the 300-page tome is visible on its dustjacket. Here, a suited and serene Howard tells us that “balance” has been a formative Australian characteristic and will “safeguard our future” if we preserve that creed.</p>
<p>The book itself is a strange product, ranging from pointed and incisive (if sometimes provocative) discussion in the early chapters to anecdotal meandering in the later ones. </p>
<p>No less than 120 pages are spent reflecting on the big issues of his own prime ministership and their relevance to the present. His chapter on the Australia-China relationship, for example, is measured and even-handed; his chapter in defence of the Iraq War is far less compelling.</p>
<p>Like so many other conservatives, Howard blames “identity politics”, the “guilt” industry (particularly surrounding Australia’s colonial past) and modern “cancel culture” for much social ill. But he is at least unambiguous in his condemnation of former US President Donald Trump and his brand of politics – balance does not that way lead.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-the-liberals-would-be-better-off-with-morrison-out-of-parliament-188838">View from The Hill: The Liberals would be better off with Morrison out of parliament</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The substance of the book is its firm intervention in debates about the modern Liberal Party. He frets about the rise of factionalism in the state organisations, lampooning for instance the tendency of NSW Liberals to schedule <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jun/26/christopher-goes-the-full-pyne-as-moderates-roast-gives-conservatives-indigestion">competing factional dinners</a> after their state conferences. </p>
<p>He rails against <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-branch-stacking-and-why-has-neither-major-party-been-able-to-stamp-it-out-140726">branch stacking</a> and argues the rise of partisan staff in political offices compounds these problems. (The number of political staff continued to expand between 1996 and 2007, we might note.) </p>
<p>Like NSW Labor Minister Rodney Cavalier’s <a href="https://www.dymocks.com.au/book/power-crisis-by-rodney-cavalier-9780521138321">Power Crisis</a>, partisans will find uncomfortable truths in this book.</p>
<p>The trick, Howard says, it to get back to the “broad church” liberalism of the his prime ministerial years. It is “respect for the individual”, “free enterprise”, “strong families”, and the “international liberal order” that define modern liberalism, with the nation-state as its instrument of expression. Climate change need not be a dividing issue among Liberals, he suggests, if nuclear power is placed in the picture. And gender problems should not undermine merit as a “basic Liberal value”. The party cannot be conservative or liberal, he declares: it must be both.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481674/original/file-20220829-8728-9s6hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481674/original/file-20220829-8728-9s6hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481674/original/file-20220829-8728-9s6hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481674/original/file-20220829-8728-9s6hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481674/original/file-20220829-8728-9s6hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481674/original/file-20220829-8728-9s6hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481674/original/file-20220829-8728-9s6hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Howard wants the Liberal Party to be both conservative and liberal.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Mick Tsikas</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The bigger picture</h2>
<p>A Sense of Balance is the latest contribution to a distinct genre of Australian political writing – the Liberal memoir. Since the 1960s, senior Australian Liberals have used their memoirs, written usually in the calmer waters of post-political life, to shape their party’s sense of identity. Given the Liberals have long suffered from, in Gerard Henderson’s terms, a “<a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2006/02/06/if-bill-shorten-is-the-answer-youre-asking-the-wrong-question/">messiah complex</a>” and a deficient sense of their own history, these books do seem to matter.</p>
<p>Robert Menzies, the party’s inaugural leader and two-time political memoirist, has much to answer for in this respect. His first memoir, Afternoon Light (1967), contained relatively little about his underlying philosophical values and beliefs (other than fealty to the British Crown). In his second book, The Measure of the Years (1970), he defended particular policy actions (such as the Colombo Plan, federal support for universities, and the expansion of the resources sector) but had little to say about liberal ideology. Not even his publishers and correspondents could agree that Menzies was liberal or conservative.</p>
<p>In Menzies’ own telling, liberalism was about “the individual, his rights, and his enterprise”, but the state was helpful in avoiding “large-scale unemployment”, which liberals took seriously in the wake of war and depression in the 1930s and 1940s. Tellingly, he said that the Liberals and the Country Party (today’s Nationals) essentially shared the same philosophy, without specifying what that entailed. </p>
<p>In truth, “anti-socialism” was the only hard and fast principle Menzies emphasised in his memoirs. Beyond that, he argued, a leader’s ideas “will break” if they “will not bend”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481675/original/file-20220829-27-jt9gt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481675/original/file-20220829-27-jt9gt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481675/original/file-20220829-27-jt9gt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481675/original/file-20220829-27-jt9gt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481675/original/file-20220829-27-jt9gt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481675/original/file-20220829-27-jt9gt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481675/original/file-20220829-27-jt9gt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Where it all began: Robert Menzies (memorialised in statue) wrote two political memoirs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The party chose for itself the name “liberal”, he said in Afternoon Light, because it rejected “reactionary” politics in favour of “progressive” reform. Moderates in the party have <a href="https://theconversation.com/turnbull-is-right-to-link-the-liberals-with-the-centre-but-is-the-centre-where-it-used-to-be-80799">repeatedly used this line</a> to attack their conservative opponents in recent years. Howard acknowledges this with scepticism in A Sense of Balance. </p>
<p>Few Liberals wrote memoirs in the decades after Menzies, and when they did, it was usually driven by <a href="https://insidestory.org.au/i-did-it-my-way/">personal and leadership conflict</a> (especially between John Gorton and Billy McMahon). </p>
<p>But at the end of the Howard years, they began publishing again in earnest. Former treasurer Peter Costello and shadow minister Tony Abbott quickly rushed out books with Melbourne University Publishing. The former (writing with his father-in-law Peter Coleman) set out an agenda of progressive “unfinished business”, while the latter defended but also moderated his brand of social conservatism in the form of Battlelines (2009).</p>
<h2>The rush to print</h2>
<p>But it was Howard and his prime ministerial predecessor, Malcolm Fraser, who dominated these literary contests. Fraser co-authored a large memoir with independent journalist Margaret Simons, launched by MUP on March 4 2010. They argued that liberalism required humanitarian compassion, respect for the rule of law, and a commitment to promoting individual liberty. Fraser and Simons used their book tour to criticise Australia’s hardline stance on asylum seekers, their fingers pointed firmly at Howard. Human rights activists and cultural influencers <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2011/05/17/simons-writing-arguing-and-wow-winning-with-malcolm-fraser/">celebrated the book</a>, but it was criticised for several years by The Australian.</p>
<p>Howard published a political autobiography, <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780730499640/lazarus-rising/">Lazarus Rising</a>, seven months later. Howard identified himself with Menzies’ “forgotten people” – the wage-earners and professionals of the modern middle-class – and stressed the importance of the party’s “broad church” encompassing many philosophies. </p>
<p>The book said much about “freedom” and “fairness”, but was unapologetic about his personal brand of “economic liberalism” and “social conservatism”. Howard promoted the book everywhere from the ABC to 2GB Radio, and was lauded as a “class act” when a protester <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RplZI0r35Y">threw shoes at him and his book on Q&A</a>.</p>
<p>When Malcolm Turnbull published his memoir A Bigger Picture in April 2020, he offered a classic “moderate” liberal through-line in the tradition of Fraser. Turnbull saw himself as a “true” liberal, independent and rational in thought, compassionate where possible, and committed above all to the rule of law. A Bigger Picture was shunned by the Party, but earned Turnbull significant applause at (virtual) writers festivals.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/julia-banks-new-book-is-part-of-a-50-year-tradition-of-female-mps-using-memoirs-to-fight-for-equality-163888">Julia Banks' new book is part of a 50-year tradition of female MPs using memoirs to fight for equality</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Return to the ‘broad church’</h2>
<p>A Sense of Balance is Howard’s third contribution to the Liberal canon, having published a book about <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781743097977/the-menzies-era/">The Menzies Era</a> in 2014. This latest effort, though well timed, trots out the same anecdotes a little too often. Howard’s discourse on the unrepresentativeness of the modern parties is compelling, though qualified by a relatively thin offering of suggested reforms to solve the issue. </p>
<p>Above all, the book is about restating the case for a “broad church” form of liberalism in which moderates and conservatives each have some purchase. For the progressive reader, Howard’s cultural politics remain exasperating. But for those whose task it is to chart a course for the Liberal Party, there are meaningful prompts in this book.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189059/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.</span></em></p>The former prime minister’s latest book calls on his party to be both liberal and conservative in order to survive.Joshua Black, PhD Candidate, School of History, National Centre of Biography, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1888382022-08-16T12:01:14Z2022-08-16T12:01:14ZView from The Hill: The Liberals would be better off with Morrison out of parliament<p>Liberal frontbencher Karen Andrews wouldn’t be alone among her colleagues in believing Scott Morrison should quit parliament.</p>
<p>Andrews, home affairs minister in the former government, on Tuesday declared the Australian people were “betrayed” by Morrison’s installing himself in five portfolios, including hers, in secret arrangements. </p>
<p>She was one of the ministers not told he’d moved in. Nor, most remarkably, was treasurer Josh Frydenberg (who a few months later stayed at The Lodge) informed he had a ministerial bedfellow. Likewise finance minister Mathias Cormann. </p>
<p>Andrews has another reason for a heightened sensitivity to Morrison’s willingness to flout conventions and propriety. </p>
<p>When an asylum seeker boat was intercepted on election day, Morrison was determined to try to exploit it politically. The pressure coming from his office onto Andrews’ office to urgently publicise the incident has been documented in a recent inquiry. </p>
<p>While Andrews defended her actions after the report was released, she lost skin. </p>
<p>Without doubt the parliamentary Liberal Party would be better off if Morrison quit. </p>
<p>Even before this week’s revelations, there was nothing he could contribute – he sits as a failure from the past in a party that will have immense trouble adjusting to the future. Now he presents a live target for Labor. Anthony Albanese on Tuesday wouldn’t rule out Labor moving a censure against him. </p>
<p>He enjoys minimal respect among his colleagues. As long as he hangs around, he’ll be a distraction. </p>
<p>Former prime minister John Howard advanced the one pragmatic argument against Morrison quitting – it would create an unwanted and expensive by-election for the Liberals. </p>
<p>“Apart from anything else it is not in the interests of the Liberal Party to have a by-election at the moment in a very safe seat, particularly as in the state of New South Wales we will face a state election in the early part of next year,” Howard said bluntly, interviewed on the ABC on Tuesday night. </p>
<p>Some would add that in these volatile political times no seat is absolutely “safe”. </p>
<p>Morrison hasn’t been expected to see out the parliamentary term. But presumably he needs a job to go to. This week’s stories will have done nothing for his employability. </p>
<p>The disclosure of Morrison’s behaviour has put heat on Governor-General David Hurley.</p>
<p>Hurley was quick to issue a Monday statement setting out how he had acted in accordance with the Constitution. He said it was up to the government whether the arrangements were made public.</p>
<p>To suggest Hurley should not have done what he was asked totally misunderstands his role. He must act according to government advice, assuming what it proposes is legal. (It might be added, however, that a wise governor-general also questions and counsels when circumstances require.) </p>
<p>University of NSW law professor and constitutional specialist George Williams suggests the convention should be put into law that all ministerial appointments be announced to parliament. </p>
<p>On Tuesday Morrison made a belated effort to explain himself. He began on 2GB – his favourite radio roost – but it was a fiasco. He didn’t recall any portfolios other than those initially mentioned (health, finance, resources) into which he’d inserted himself. </p>
<p>It fell to Albanese to add home affairs and treasury. To have apparently forgotten you have made yourself treasurer is really something. </p>
<p>Later Morrison issued a long Facebook post, in which he invoked the “extraordinary times” of COVID that required “extraordinary measures” to justify his actions. </p>
<p>“I took the precaution of being given authority to administer various departments of state should the need arise due to incapacity of a minister or in the national interest.” This was where ministers had specific powers under legislation not subject to cabinet oversight. Health was the major example. </p>
<p>Morrison said treasury and home affairs were added as a “belts and braces” precaution in May 2021.</p>
<p>He explained his lack of memory of key portfolios by saying “there was a lot going on at the time” and the powers hadn’t had to be used. </p>
<p>Why not inform all the relevant ministers, the cabinet, the public? (Health Minister Greg Hunt knew and Morrison did think Cormann had been told, but there was some glitch.) Morrison said he didn’t want ministers “second guessing themselves”, or for their authority to be diminished.</p>
<p>The one area where Morrison used the power he’d acquired was in the resources portfolio, and this had nothing to do with COVID and everything to do with votes. There he became minister so he could overrule the publicly designated minister, Keith Pitt, on the issue of gas exploration off the NSW coast.</p>
<p>“Once having been given the authority to consider this matter I advised the minister of my intention to do so,” Morrison said. “This was the only matter I involved myself directly with in this or any other department”. </p>
<p>Morrison ended his post with an apology “for any offence to my colleagues”. But he showed little sign he comprehended why they would be so deeply offended by his lack of respect, represented by his unwillingness to take them into his confidence.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188838/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Liberal frontbencher Karen Andrews wouldn’t be alone among her colleagues in believing Scott Morrison should quit parliament.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1870212022-07-26T20:05:15Z2022-07-26T20:05:15ZWhy is Peter Dutton trying to start another political fight over the school curriculum?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474853/original/file-20220719-26-86lje8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=41%2C49%2C5416%2C3558&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mick Tsikas/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a move that surprised political watchers, Liberal leader Peter Dutton <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/schools-reform-a-peter-dutton-priority/news-story/5517de8583dd0e88ee428abe950442a2">says</a> the school curriculum and education reform will be some of his key priorities in opposition. </p>
<p>Despite the Morrison government signing off on the latest version of the curriculum just before the election, Dutton argues a “broader discussion” is needed. </p>
<p>As he told <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/schools-reform-a-peter-dutton-priority/news-story/5517de8583dd0e88ee428abe950442a2">The Australian</a> earlier this month, “there is a lot of non-core curriculum that is being driven by unions and by other activists that parents are concerned about”.</p>
<p>NSW Liberal senator Hollie Hughes has also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/26/education-system-run-by-marxists-jason-clare-takes-aim-at-liberal-senator-over-comments-on-teachers">blamed</a> her party’s election loss on “Marxist” teachers filling students’ heads with “left-wing rubbish”. </p>
<p>This may seem like an strange issue to prioritise after an election loss, with issues like climate change and cost-of-living front of mind for many voters. But there is a long tradition of “curriculum wars” in Australia, going back decades.</p>
<p>Parents concerned about this debate and what their kids may be “picking up” in the classroom should also understand this history.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1541612689109438464"}"></div></p>
<h2>Curriculum and the conservative culture wars</h2>
<p>Dutton’s attempt to reignite the culture wars harks back to former Prime Minister John Howard, who <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/howard-claims-victory-in-national-culture-wars-20060126-ge1n0k.html">railed against</a> a “black armband” view of history, “political correctness” and the “divisive, phoney debate about national identity”. Howard <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/education/keeping-a-date-with-history-20060814-ge2ws7.html">argued</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The time has also come for root and branch renewal of the teaching of Australian history in our schools […] it has succumbed to a postmodern culture of relativism where any objective record of achievement is questioned or repudiated.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Following suit, as opposition leader in 2013, Tony Abbott claimed the national curriculum had become <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/election-2013/history-syllabus-needs-a-rethink-says-abbott/news-story/628f52463e23cd3b20df7cc0714fe86a">politicised</a> by left-wing teachers with history underselling the contributions and heritage of Western civilisation. He said there was a</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Lack of references to our heritage, other than an Indigenous heritage, too great a focus on issues which are the predominant concern of one side of politics.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Once in government, Abbott ordered a review of the national curriculum in 2014, claiming that schools needed to go “<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/pm-calls-for-schools-to-go-back-to-basics-20141012-3hu4x.html">back to the basics</a>”.</p>
<p>Abbott’s handpicked <a href="https://www.dese.gov.au/australian-curriculum/resources/review-australian-curriculum-final-report-2014">reviewers</a> argued for greater emphasis on Western literature and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-29/donnelly-the-bible-deserves-a-place-in-the-national-curriculum/3750156">Judeo-Christian heritage</a>. The revised curriculum <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/about-the-australian-curriculum/">(version 8.0)</a> was released in 2015 and has been in place until recently. </p>
<h2>The American connection</h2>
<p>Australia’s curriculum wars can also be <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/06/02/peter-dutton-education-culture-wars/">linked</a> to education debates in the United States.</p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://theconversation.com/critical-race-theory-what-it-is-and-what-it-isnt-162752">critical race theory</a> has become a key battleground for conservative culture wars against public schooling, teacher autonomy and curriculum. These debates are designed to create moral panic for parents, who worry that they send their kids to school to learn the facts, but are instead indoctrinated by <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504630.2020.1787822">cultural Marxists</a> dressed as teachers.</p>
<p>The rise of <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/homeschooling-skyrocketed-during-pandemic-what-does-future-hold-online-neighborhood-pods-cooperatives/">homeschooling</a> and school choice in <a href="https://theconversation.com/school-choice-policies-are-associated-with-increased-separation-of-students-by-social-class-149902">Australia</a> and the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/how-school-choice-became-an-explosive-issue/251897/">US</a> are driven in large part by concerns about curriculum.</p>
<h2>Who gets to choose the curriculum in Australia?</h2>
<p>It is important for parents to know that the curriculum – what gets taught in our schools – is not developed by unions nor activists.</p>
<p>While teachers have a say in how their lessons are taught, the curriculum is developed and monitored by state and territory education authorities.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-senate-has-voted-to-reject-critical-race-theory-from-the-national-curriculum-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter-163102">The Senate has voted to reject critical race theory from the national curriculum. What is it, and why does it matter?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Following their 2007 election, Labor promised an “<a href="https://ministers.dese.gov.au/gillard/education-revolution-our-schools">education revolution</a>”. This was the start of greater involvement by the federal government in curriculum development and assessment.</p>
<p>The newly created Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority released the first version of the Australian curriculum in 2010. This is the body that is also responsible for implementing the MySchool website and the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests.</p>
<p>Government schools are required to follow state and territory mandated curriculum guidelines, while Catholic, independent and other non-government schools have more <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/implementation-of-the-australian-curriculum/">curriculum flexibility</a>. This includes offering alternative curriculum options such as Steiner, Montessori or International Baccalaureate programs.</p>
<h2>The latest curriculum</h2>
<p>The latest review of the curriculum (version 9.0) was undertaken with the aim to “<a href="https://www.acara.edu.au/docs/default-source/curriculum/ac-review_terms-of-reference_website.pdf">refine, realign and declutter</a>” the curriculum content within its existing structure.</p>
<p>There was an extensive <a href="https://www.acara.edu.au/docs/default-source/media-releases/endorsement-ac-media-release-2022.pdf">consultation period</a> during 2020–2021, with more than 6,000 surveys, 900 emails and 360 teachers and curriculum specialists involved in the review.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Liberal leader Peter Dutton speaking to former Prime Minister John Howard." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475329/original/file-20220721-13-j99nee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475329/original/file-20220721-13-j99nee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475329/original/file-20220721-13-j99nee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475329/original/file-20220721-13-j99nee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475329/original/file-20220721-13-j99nee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475329/original/file-20220721-13-j99nee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475329/original/file-20220721-13-j99nee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former Prime Minister John Howard pictured with new Liberal leader Peter Dutton at a June 2022 book launch.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mick Tsikas/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even so, acting education minister Stuart Robert wrote to the chair of the Australian curriculum authority in February <a href="https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2022/07/09/pushing-bullshit-leaked-docs-reveal-duttons-education-farce">requesting extra changes</a> to portray a “more balanced view of Australian history”. He specifically wanted to ensure</p>
<blockquote>
<p>that key aspects of Australian history, namely 1750–1914 and Australia’s post World War II migrant history, are appropriately prioritised.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Following this, 55% of <a href="https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2022/07/09/pushing-bullshit-leaked-docs-reveal-duttons-education-farce">history curriculum content</a> between Years 7 and 10 was removed.</p>
<p><a href="https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au/">Version 9.0</a> of the Australian Curriculum was then endorsed by federal and state education ministers in April, shortly before the federal election was called.</p>
<h2>Where to from here?</h2>
<p>New education minister Jason Clare has been quick to <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/not-interested-in-picking-fights-new-education-minister-says-curriculum-wars-have-been-settled-20220603-p5aqtb.html">dismiss</a> Dutton’s attempts to fire up the curriculum wars, telling The Sydney Morning Herald, “I’m not interested in picking fights”.</p>
<p>So, as the updated curriculum begins to roll out across Australian schools from 2023, it will be interesting to see how much momentum Dutton generates.</p>
<p>Granted, a proposed move to <a href="https://ministers.dese.gov.au/robert/education-ministers-agree-new-australian-curriculum">continuous curriculum updates</a> instead of every five or six years will potentially make it easier to politically interfere with the curriculum.</p>
<p>But it is important to remember that education authorities determine the curriculum – not unions, not activists and ideally not the minister of the day.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-is-only-one-front-in-the-history-curriculum-wars-30888">Australia is only one front in the history curriculum wars</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187021/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stewart Riddle has received funding from the Australian Research Council (LP210100098 Constructing a Rich Curriculum for All: ‘Insights into Practice’). </span></em></p>The new Liberal leader says education is a top priority and ‘activists’ are driving ‘non-core’ subjects in schools.Stewart Riddle, Associate Professor, School of Education, University of Southern QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1871102022-07-21T20:23:10Z2022-07-21T20:23:10ZFriday essay: 30 years after Mabo, what do Australia’s battler stories – and their evasions – say about who we are?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475304/original/file-20220721-18-m6v206.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C5%2C3988%2C1988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> </figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-the-mabo-decision-and-native-title-74147">Mabo decision</a> in 1992
was a turning point for Australia. It finally overturned the dishonest doctrine of <em>terra nullius</em> and recognised Indigenous land rights. It was a moment of hope, accompanied by a productive tension.</p>
<p>Mabo followed a decade in which awareness of the need to address Indigenous dispossession had grown. In the preceding years, sectors of the (white) settler population had begun to distance themselves from a triumphalist, uncritical view of the past. They had finally stopped looking away.</p>
<p>They had stopped looking away from shocking dispossession, disregard, and dismissal of the nation’s First Peoples. From the pretences of equality, a <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-australia-land-of-the-fair-go-not-everyone-gets-an-equal-slice-of-the-pie-70480">fair go</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/mateship-might-sound-blokey-but-our-research-shows-women-value-it-more-highly-than-men-169154">mateship</a>. From the flattening of intersections of identity such as <a href="https://theconversation.com/should-the-census-ask-about-race-its-not-a-simple-question-and-may-reinforce-racial-thinking-185295">race</a>, cultural backgrounds; and sexualities other than heteronormative. </p>
<p>An important cultural conflict, out in the open, seemed imminent. It would have been healthy.</p>
<p>Paul Keating broached some of that necessary conversation in the December 1992 <a href="https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf">Redfern Park Speech</a>. Although that speech has been over-eulogised since, it was the first time that a prime minister used the pronoun “we”, naming settler Australians as the ones who needed to shift their attitudes and behaviour and take responsibility.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LAFaHP6w6tE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Paul Keating’s Redfern Park Speech was the first time a prime minister used “we”, recognising responsibility for invasion.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘Comfortable and relaxed’ evasion</h2>
<p>But the Mabo judgement also sparked a backlash which in 1996 contributed to the election of a new prime minister. John Howard immediately set about <a href="https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-10217">urging Australians</a> to feel “comfortable and relaxed” about the past. Howard shifted the “We” of Keating to “Us” (and “Them”). </p>
<p>Since then, Howard’s masterful weaponisation of “us and them” as a cornerstone of national identity has influenced debates in literary and artistic circles. He transitioned the Australian psyche from Menzies’ <a href="http://www.liberals.net/theforgottenpeople.htm">forgotten people</a> to Howard’s <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/howards-battlers-a-broad-church-20040519-gdxvk8.html">battlers</a> – who eventually became the Morrison <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_quiet_Australians">quiet Australians</a> of the past four years. </p>
<p>Conservative governments have held office for the lion’s share of the 30 years since 1992. Their politicians have historically pitted those who are interested in advancing conversations (and genuine dialogues) around class, racial, and gendered equity against the “ordinary” Australian – usually still imagined as a white settler. </p>
<p>The robust public discussions around intersectionality, equity and diversity – along with social justice agendas and displays of ethnic identity and pride – that were coming to be considered healthy in a pre-Howard era were repositioned as a divisive “them” discourse. They still are.</p>
<p>I want to unwind the post-Mabo climate, and the continuing evasion legacy of the Howard years in settler writing, through examining some settler texts (the storytelling emerging from settler colonialism) spanning the late 1990s to where we are today, in 2022. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/live-streamed-event-top-thinkers-explore-the-life-and-legacy-of-eddie-mabo-186543">Live-streamed event: Top thinkers explore the life and legacy of Eddie Mabo</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Castle, Mabo and Howard’s ‘Us-Australians’</h2>
<p>In 1997, a film hit Australian cinemas that nailed the Howard ethos and represented the “Us-Australians”. It set the blueprint for the largely flatliner, non-intersectional, evasive textual conversation to follow. The film was <a href="https://theconversation.com/straight-to-the-pool-room-a-love-letter-to-the-castle-on-its-25th-anniversary-176361">The Castle</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475083/original/file-20220720-26-kemjmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a man stands under a plane, hands on hips, in front of a house" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475083/original/file-20220720-26-kemjmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475083/original/file-20220720-26-kemjmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475083/original/file-20220720-26-kemjmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475083/original/file-20220720-26-kemjmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475083/original/file-20220720-26-kemjmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475083/original/file-20220720-26-kemjmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475083/original/file-20220720-26-kemjmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The original 1997 film poster for The Castle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Castle is the story of the Kerrigan family – portrayed as an ordinary, clean-living, working-class family in western Melbourne. The family live in a ramshackle home they have built themselves, just a few metres from Melbourne Airport in Tullamarine. </p>
<p>When their family home is condemned by a building inspector and plans are revealed, showing that the property is to become part of a government-planned expansion of airspace, the family enter a legal battle to save their family home. The plot of the film revolves around this battle.</p>
<p>25 years on, the timing of this film and its post-Mabo message are worth unwinding.</p>
<p>The film’s narrative verifies gender binaries, heteronormativity, larrikinism, healthy scepticism, surface egalitarianism and manual-hands-on type jobs. It verifies minimal engagement with national/current affairs, mateship, and the great Aussie illusion of luck and chance. It reflects minimum diversity always matched with jibes at difference, masked as humour (e.g. “the wogs next-door”). And it valorises an attachment to the Australian dream of private property, represented through a small corner of Australia – the suburban backyard.</p>
<p>Comic as The Castle may be, its overt ideology can be interpreted critically as enacting a self-reflexivity on the part of the viewer: a <em>how-would-you-feel-if-you-were-the-Kerrigan-family</em> moment. It undermines the disengagement from politics, national and current affairs that was being encouraged from late 1990s Australia, which is still persistent in popular settler texts. But it also enacts a disengagement with “other Australians who don’t have any property to start with”. It’s a story for the propertied only.</p>
<p>Daryl Kerrigan makes a brief and fleeting reference to “knowing how the Aborigines feel”, in having land stolen. It’s poised as a statement spoken to the nation for brief consideration, as if Daryl is saying it for everyone. His wife’s dismissal with “have you been drinking?” and Daryl’s short rejoinder, “people have got to stop stealing other people’s land in this country”, are striking for the way the sentence is allowed to hang – inviting the rest of the “Us-Australians” to whom John Howard was talking to finish the statement. Moreover, the audience can.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qFr2Gh6yIyQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Daryl Kerrigan’s reference to ‘knowing how the Aborigines feel’ in having their land stolen is poised as if for brief consideration.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I think it is no accident that the moment is poised and framed this way: to allow the viewer time for a quick mental calculation between their “little piece of Australia” and the vast tracts of Australian First Nations land that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTtlHZxigOY">Howard’s government positioned</a> as “under threat from Native Title” when he used a pendulum to describe Australia’s swing towards recognition of First Nations sovereignty (and the need to address it through the 1996 <a href="https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/original/00010323.pdf">Wik Ten-Point Plan</a>).</p>
<p>What doesn’t Daryl Kerrigan say? Where does he not go? Which people and whose land? Which land has got to stop getting stolen? And when it’s got to stop? And what of the intersections of identity, and the entanglements between First Nations peoples, settlers, and many different diasporas to Australia since – left unexplored in this statement, in this text – who have been largely evaded in Australian mainstream literature since?</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GTtlHZxigOY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">John Howard claimed on the 7.30 Report, in 1997, that 78% of Australia’s landmass was under threat from Native Title claims.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Also – how polite is the text? It’s the ultra-genteel working-class backbone of Australia on display. Howard ushered in, and his legacy left, an era of the dangerous politics of settler civility – the language of euphemism and evasion.</p>
<p>There’s nothing about the Kerrigan family that threatens the status quo of the “Australian Dream” and the mythscape of a united nation. </p>
<p>The Kerrigans’ challenge to the system is positioned as a healthy insurgence – the Kerrigans’ quarter acre is inconsequential to the state. Their win is positioned as a concession to a good family by a benevolent system. The film glorifies white crime as Aussie <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-larrikin-lives-on-as-a-conservative-politician-168464">larrikinism</a> – there’s a son in jail, a scene with a firearm, a scene where a truck is used to tear down someone’s front gate. </p>
<p>The film upholds a landmark case, for which and whose land (or property) really is sacred in post-Mabo Australia – and it’s not First Nations land. At a time when right-wing politicians and newspapers were arguing against native title, The Castle sold a story to a nervous nation that was quite reassuring.</p>
<p>Think about the casting. How would these roles fly with a family that’s anything other than white? What sort of appeal would the film have had (and still have) if the family at the centre, fighting for their piece of land, were Aboriginal? Or Lebanese? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475078/original/file-20220720-26-cklqel.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475078/original/file-20220720-26-cklqel.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475078/original/file-20220720-26-cklqel.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=296&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475078/original/file-20220720-26-cklqel.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=296&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475078/original/file-20220720-26-cklqel.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=296&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475078/original/file-20220720-26-cklqel.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475078/original/file-20220720-26-cklqel.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475078/original/file-20220720-26-cklqel.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">How would the characters of The Castle – and their actions – play with a cast that wasn’t white?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Can you imagine the different reaction if a First Nations protagonist or a protagonist of Islamic heritage had pulled down the gates to someone else’s property in a tow-truck, or pulled a gun on someone? Would it be funny then? </p>
<p>Imagine a First Nations family being as relaxed as the Kerrigans are about their son – or anyone – being incarcerated. An audit of secondary social science and humanities curricula that I undertook in 2020 revealed that The Castle is the most taught text in units relating to identity and culture in Australian high schools. This film is a canonised text for Australian settler identity.</p>
<p>At the end of the Howard era, Australia’s Indigenous population was in a ruinous state. Australia’s extraordinary natural environment was threatened on numerous fronts, and its people were beginning to ask where the wealth had gone. Public schools and public health were in crisis, social welfare was decimated, housing was unaffordable for many, and wages and conditions were being cut under Howard’s industrial reforms.</p>
<p>At the height of the 2001 election, when 400 refugees were rescued from a sinking boat and left stranded in the tropical heat on the deck of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-the-mv-tampa-and-the-transformation-of-asylum-seeker-policy-74078">Tampa</a>, Howard publicly refused permission to land the refugees in Australia. His immigration and defence ministers claimed that refugees had thrown their children overboard, leading Howard to <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/a-bit-of-empathy-wouldnt-go-amiss-20040817-gdjkbs.html">declare</a>: “I don’t want people like that in Australia.” Only after the election was it proven that the government had known the claim was false. </p>
<p>Truth became an inconvenient detail from here on. We entered an era of <a href="https://theconversation.com/post-truth-politics-and-why-the-antidote-isnt-simply-fact-checking-and-truth-87364">post-truth</a>. The nation’s already murky relationship with its hidden truths – its <a href="https://theconversation.com/of-course-australia-was-invaded-massacres-happened-here-less-than-90-years-ago-55377">settlement by invasion</a>, massacre and cultural genocide, and the continued <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-australia-wont-recognise-indigenous-customary-law-60370">legal fiction of terra nullius</a> – were relegated to the spectre of irresolution that hangs over of the nation.</p>
<p>At the heart of the legacy of Howard’s 11-year era is an unease, and (dis) ease – something deeper that Australians would perhaps rather not admit. For a decade, Howard’s power had resided in his ability to speak directly and powerfully to the great negativity at the core of the Australian soul. Its timidity, its conformity, its fear of other people and new ideas. Its colonial desire to ape rather than lead – and its shame (which sometimes seems close to a terror) of the uniqueness of its land and people. </p>
<p>The country was frightened: unready for the great changes it must make, and ill-fitted for the robust debates it must have.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/post-truth-politics-and-why-the-antidote-isnt-simply-fact-checking-and-truth-87364">Post-truth politics and why the antidote isn't simply 'fact-checking' and truth</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Alexis Wright’s overtly political, ‘distinctly First Nations’ debut novel</h2>
<p>Released in 1997, the same year as The Castle, paralleling the narrative of “Us”, was <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/plains-of-promise">Plains of Promise</a>, the debut novel by Waanyi writer <a href="https://theconversation.com/alexis-wright-wins-2018-stella-prize-for-tracker-an-epic-feat-of-aboriginal-storytelling-94906">Alexis Wright</a>. </p>
<p>Alexis’s work arrived with much less fanfare – it was neither subtle nor polite, amid its intricate plot and beautifully crafted words in the language of the coloniser. Plains of Promise spoke to the “Them” – those “other Australians” outside of the “Us” that Howard claimed to be governing for. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475077/original/file-20220720-15-bud0gi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475077/original/file-20220720-15-bud0gi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475077/original/file-20220720-15-bud0gi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475077/original/file-20220720-15-bud0gi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475077/original/file-20220720-15-bud0gi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475077/original/file-20220720-15-bud0gi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475077/original/file-20220720-15-bud0gi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475077/original/file-20220720-15-bud0gi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Plains of Promise is a story of mothers and daughters who endure and survive a series of colonial interventions. A story of the intergenerational trauma of separation, dispossession from land, and repeated sexual assaults of Aboriginal women at the hands of white men and black men who have internalised the worst of settler behaviours. The novel ends with a powerful allegory that alludes to a precarious future for First Nations peoples under conservative governments. </p>
<p>Wright’s narrative is a brutal parody of settler texts like The Castle, and the Howard-Australian mythscape that evoked Russell Ward’s <a href="https://insidestory.org.au/the-legend-turns-fifty/">Australian Legend</a> of egalitarianism, mateship, larrikinism, anti-intellectualism, and healthy, non-threatening anti-authoritarianism. </p>
<p>Plains of Promise posits an overtly political, distinctly First Nations, and determinedly fictional and literary account of Indigenous peoples’ experiences in Australia. It’s a text that writes at the <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-intersectionality-mean-104937">intersectionality</a> of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, chauvinism; and all that hover in the spectre of irresolution and dis-ease above the nation – and the bearing that these intersections and entanglements have on the First Nations, Waanyi protagonists of the novel. </p>
<p>With its particular focus on the way the intersections of sexism, classism, ableism, and racism impact the lives and futures of Waanyi women, Plains of Promise is the total antithesis of: <em>A man’s home is his castle!</em> Alexis achieves this through making First Nations identities visible and complex, and by highlighting ongoing colonial dispossession and struggles for land rights and recognition.</p>
<p>We are now living under the spectre of post-Howard euphemisms that locate truth as divisive. First Nations people are labelled as rude or confrontational if we point out cultural chauvinism in settler language or call out skin privilege or white fragility. Under Howard and his “Us-Australians”, charges of “identity politics” were levelled against “Them-Australians” – and identity politics were positioned as both anti-Australian and anti-art. This remains the case.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/read-listen-understand-why-non-indigenous-australians-should-read-first-nations-writing-78925">Read, listen, understand: why non-Indigenous Australians should read First Nations writing</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>All writing is identity politics</h2>
<p>Attacks on <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-conservatives-use-identity-politics-to-shut-down-debate-89026">“identity politics”</a> and the construction of an ideological hard binary between ethnic identity and art and literature are legacies of post-Howardism. Yet the idea that any artwork or piece of literature is free of cultural value is mythical and warrants interrogation.</p>
<p>Some terms are used a lot, but rarely deconstructed – like the slippery charge of “identity politics” in art and literature. So, the scientists have been telling us for some time that <a href="https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/">the concept of race is dead</a>. I don’t dispute what it all looks like under a microscope, but socially and politically, the term and all its connotations are alive and well – in literature, art, music, policy. And the terms “race” and “culture” are conflated in Australian discourse. </p>
<p>Together, these words drive Australian national policy and historical discourse. The politics of race, the politics of skin privilege and the politics of representation have been cornerstones of Australian policy and practice since invasion. Literature is the handmaiden who tells this tale. White identity politics is the most dominant force of production in Australian settler literary culture. </p>
<p>Charges of identity politics impeding art have only entered the public space since First Nations people and people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities have infiltrated the space, and now use it and some of the “tools” it affords to tell their own tales – or stories. </p>
<p>These presences challenge the unspoken identity of white-settlerism and make identities explicit – and explicitly political, as they have been politicised in public discourse. Charges of “identity politics” come from those who now have to concede space – and see themselves represented, not always to their own liking, in someone else’s picture or story.</p>
<p>All creative pieces are identity politics in some way or other. All writing is identity politics: from a shopping list to a treatise on government and all in-between. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-black-lives-matter-movement-has-provoked-a-cultural-reckoning-about-how-black-stories-are-told-149544">The Black Lives Matter movement has provoked a cultural reckoning about how Black stories are told</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Popular settler texts, post-Mabo</h2>
<p>So, how am I reading the settler landscape of influential writing post-Mabo, and in the aftermath of Howardism? Influence is decided by the literary economy of prizes, and the public visibility of a text.</p>
<p>In the main, settler texts are still repurposed, largely intersectionless battler narratives, where the protagonists battle different obstacles depending on the times. Or, as Sujatha Fernandes put it so well in <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/cummins-american-dirt-krien-act-of-grace/">her 2019 essay</a> for the Sydney Review of Books, they are “great white social justice narratives”. Though they may read as concern, really the writer should be yielding space for those they are so concerned about to speak, write or tell their own stories.</p>
<p>Popular settler literature in post Mabo-Australia (and literature on the border between literary and popular) still loves to be a “good battler narrative”. The best battler is the battler who succeeds. The one who is aspirational within a recognisable setting. </p>
<p>And the best battler narrative re-enforces a meritocracy and the myth of a classless, raceless, society, where intersectionality is irrelevant. It continues to erase deeper, more complex, and contested histories of place. It’s a place that flattens or erases intersectionality – racial/cultural background, orientation/sexuality (what is your pronoun?), age, ability, religion/spirituality, socio-economic class – and the complex and contested histories of place.</p>
<p>What can we learn about contemporary Australia from its popularly and critically acclaimed novels – and their success? This is a question that critics and reviewers have been reluctant to broach. Critics tend to avoid writing about popular works, as part of an intra-cultural cringe. </p>
<p>But by refusing to engage, they’re in danger of writing into a blinkered, self-informed space that reproduces a very narrow view of Australian national identity and the values it perpetuates in its literature.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-larrikin-lives-on-as-a-conservative-politician-168464">The larrikin lives on — as a conservative politician</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Trent Dalton’s superficial melting pot</h2>
<p>A popular writer is the public’s barometer. The optimistically conservative view of national identity – Australianness if you like – that was aired in The Castle 25 years ago has carried through to the popular literature of the moment. You only need to look at Trent Dalton. </p>
<p>Unlike many popular, big-selling Australian authors, Dalton’s writing has been listed for prestigious awards. His first novel, <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460757765/boy-swallows-universe/">Boy Swallows Universe</a>, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2019. At the NSW Premier’s Prizes, it won the Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, and the People’s Choice Award, and was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475079/original/file-20220720-12-sgbr12.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475079/original/file-20220720-12-sgbr12.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475079/original/file-20220720-12-sgbr12.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475079/original/file-20220720-12-sgbr12.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475079/original/file-20220720-12-sgbr12.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475079/original/file-20220720-12-sgbr12.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475079/original/file-20220720-12-sgbr12.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475079/original/file-20220720-12-sgbr12.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The plot of Boy Swallows Universe revolves around the coming of age of teenager Eli Bell – son of a heroin-addicted mother, an alcoholic father, a drug-dealing stepfather; and brother to Gus, an elective mute since age six. As the story unfolds, Eli overcomes many obstacles and learns much about being ‘street-wise’ from his babysitter Slim, a convicted murderer. The plot is driven by Eli’s largely individualistic quest to determine what a “good man” is.</p>
<p>Boy Swallows Universe <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/dalton-shimmering-skies-boy-swallows-universe/">is apparently</a> the fastest-selling Australian debut novel ever published. With one exception I’ve found, reviewers have been laudatory. The labels of “literariness” could be because both Dalton’s works are laced with literary allusions, and brief and fleeting references to western classics. For example, an orphaned teenager, Molly, carries The Collected Works of Shakespeare in their duffle bag; Eli is well versed in the 20th-century white male canon, and often bursts into optimistic streams of consciousness, in a way that is meant to evoke <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-wonder-of-joyces-ulysses-79417">James Joyce</a>. </p>
<p>Such literary allusions and references reassure readers that these works and their protagonists are literary, despite the grungy realism of the settings; and that the western literary canon endures.</p>
<p>In the <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/dalton-shimmering-skies-boy-swallows-universe/">one critical review</a> I could find (in the Sydney Review of Books), settler critic Catriona Menzies Pike described Dalton as the “Scott Morrison writer” of the decade. Howard’s “battlers” segues seamlessly into Morrison’s quiet Australians who <em>have a go to get a go</em>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475080/original/file-20220720-18-opd0m0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475080/original/file-20220720-18-opd0m0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475080/original/file-20220720-18-opd0m0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475080/original/file-20220720-18-opd0m0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475080/original/file-20220720-18-opd0m0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475080/original/file-20220720-18-opd0m0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475080/original/file-20220720-18-opd0m0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475080/original/file-20220720-18-opd0m0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460759325/all-our-shimmering-skies/">All Our Shimmering Skies</a> is Dalton’s second novel. Set in Darwin in 1942, it’s about teenager Molly Hook’s quest to remove a curse she believes was cast on her family by an Aboriginal man called Longcoat Bob. To me as an Aboriginal reader, Longcoat Bob, penned in 2020, resonates with an ongoing colonial trope – that of the part-Aboriginal (sic) child, and the black witch-doctor-sorcerer stereotype in settler literature. From Marbuck in Charles Chauvel’s 1955 film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048227/">Jedda the Uncivilised</a> to Bobwirridirridi in Xavier Herbert’s Miles Franklin award-winning work <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460703243/poor-fellow-my-country/">Poor Fellow My Country</a> (published in 1975), through to Craig Silvey’s <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Craig-Silvey-Jasper-Jones-9781742372624">Jasper Jones</a>, 2009 – the trope lives on.</p>
<p>In Shimmering Skies, the “our” pronoun, in Dalton’s hands, becomes a conduit for a melting pot. Evoking the language of evasion and euphemism, a group of “diverse” people – whose differences are superficially and stereotypically represented throughout – can put all differences (which aren’t explored anyway) aside and unite under common symbols, traditions, and icons.</p>
<p>We’re given a painless, quick, sentimental version of <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-courage-to-feel-uncomfortable-what-australians-need-to-learn-to-achieve-real-reconciliation-183914">reconciliation</a> that basically involves finding aspects of settlement to celebrate – with no basis whatsoever for land rights or reparative justice. Readers are presented with chess-set characters in starry campfire scenes that bring together Yukio, a Japanese pilot; Greta, a woman of German heritage; Molly, an orphaned teen; and her Aboriginal friend Sam, as they discover their common humanity as bombs explode in the sky. </p>
<p>Catriona Menzies Pike <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/dalton-shimmering-skies-boy-swallows-universe/">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dalton presents a national domain in which no obstacle is too great for an earnest and well-intentioned individual to overcome on their own. There is seemingly no ill in the world that can’t be sentimentalised by Dalton: prison life, addiction, violence, colonialism. There is no insight into contemporary life here, just fantasy built on nostalgia and dishonest nationalism.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Boy Swallows Universe and All Our Shimmering Skies offer Hollywood endings, where kids haul themselves up and out of poverty and disempowerment, through strength of will and character. </p>
<p>These stories give literary and social value to a narrative that relies on and reinforces pernicious, dangerous, and untrue ideas about poverty and social marginalisation – mainly, that it requires nothing more than effort to get out of it. Socio-economic success and security simply become questions of individual moral fortitude, altruism, and determination. Systemic structural failures are not called into question.</p>
<p>The only role for First Nations and people of colour in Dalton’s national epic is to advance the plot. The people brought together under the shimmering skies are settlers. All Our Shimmering Skies wants a quick and easy, group-hug reconciliation – but the text doesn’t want to recognise the violence of settler colonialism and ongoing dispossession. </p>
<p>In his fiction, Dalton refuses to acknowledge that there’s anything structural about the suffering his characters must endure. There’s no room for state intervention or reform in these worlds. </p>
<p>Both works unequivocally disseminate the same intensely conservative vision of nationhood and identity as The Castle. </p>
<p>Ethnic and gender stereotypes abound – but as Menzies-Pike points out, the difficult questions about representation and cultural appropriation that are recently being asked of literary authors have not been raised in relation to Dalton’s fiction. Such issues are seldom raised in relation to popular fiction because it is too easily dismissed. </p>
<h2>Ignoring the popular makes us ‘part of the problem’</h2>
<p>Different sets of rules apply to popular (or genre) fiction and literary fiction. Definitions tend to centre around literary fiction being more driven by character and theme, while popular commercial fiction is driven by plot and lots of action – and distinguished by higher book sales. </p>
<p>Whether it is clever marketing on the part of publishers, or whether it is driven by intellectual snobbery and elitism, the divide between popular (or genre) and literary fiction leads to a disconnect between what is being read and internalised by the public, and what is being analysed as good literature. </p>
<p>This separation between “literature” and the rest of culture is unhelpful. Popular culture should be held to the same high standards as literary authors – which means that critics, academics and the rest of the self-selected elite need to properly engage with it. If they do, they will unpack what is driving its mass appeal.</p>
<p>Nurturing critical thinking is the responsibility of all of us who read literature and care about issues of representation. All of us who care about exposing and addressing structural inequalities and systematic discrimination. If we only focus on changing the “literary” culture we read, but ignore what mainstream Australia is reading, then we’re part of the problem of Australia’s continuing evasion discourse.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-courage-to-feel-uncomfortable-what-australians-need-to-learn-to-achieve-real-reconciliation-183914">The courage to feel uncomfortable: what Australians need to learn to achieve real reconciliation</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187110/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeanine Leane receives funding from ARC grants. </span></em></p>What do popular ‘settler’ Australian stories like The Castle and Trent Dalton’s books say about who we are? What do they evade? Jeanine Leane investigates the state of post-Mabo Australian literature.Jeanine Leane, Associate Professor In Creative Writing, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1829532022-05-12T12:20:54Z2022-05-12T12:20:54ZGrattan on Friday: It’s Albanese’s to lose, as Morrison looks for some momentum<p>The Liberals have used John Howard extensively during this campaign. These days, they celebrate their party hero as the great winner. He was, however, the last Liberal prime minister to take his party into the wilderness. </p>
<p>There are comparisons and contrasts between 2007 and 2022. In each election the Coalition government was “old” – in 2007 it was seeking a fifth term; now it’s asking for a fourth. </p>
<p>People were “over” Howard, as they’re “over” Scott Morrison. But the feeling against Howard was that he’d had his time – it’s visceral against Morrison. </p>
<p>Kevin Rudd was a fresh face, plugged into the rising issue of the times, climate change. Anthony Albanese often projects more as old Labor than future Labor. </p>
<p>Oh, and interest rates went up by 25 basis points during each campaign – to 6.75% (an 11 year high) in 2007 and to 0.35% in 2022 (still at rock bottom). </p>
<p>Despite Albanese’s campaign hiccups, at the end of this penultimate week, based on the objective evidence, the election appears his to lose. </p>
<p>The Australian newspaper’s <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/federal-election-2022-labor-to-win-modest-majority-with-80-seats-yougov-poll-predicts/news-story/84c4634d4fd3671e5194a2c5739b3e2c">YouGov poll</a>, which surveyed almost 19,000 people across all lower house seats between April 14 and May 7, had Labor on track to majority government. </p>
<p>This is not predictive – it’s a snapshot. Both sides know the final campaign days provide risks and opportunities. </p>
<p>A sizeable number of voters have yet to firm up their decisions. In particular, how will soft Liberal voters who are put off by Morrison break? Between those who opt to swallow hard and stick with the government and those who can’t stomach the PM any longer? </p>
<p>But to state the obvious, Morrison has a short time in which to try reduce a big margin. Last minute scare campaigns can play effectively; unexpected developments can change the dynamics. But that’s only if enough voters in the right seats retain an open mind.</p>
<p>The Liberals have left their launch, to be held in Brisbane on Sunday, until the last moment. New policy will be announced. Morrison needs to garner some momentum from it for the home run. </p>
<p>Next week will see the release of important economic data, on unemployment and wages. The government will be hoping the unemployment figure, most recently 4%, will have a three in front of it. That would be good news for the Coalition’s economic pitch. </p>
<p>The wages number could play to Labor. </p>
<p>Wages growth was 2.3% in the year to December. Any increase on that for the year to March would be expected to be small. The Reserve Bank has forecast wage growth of 2.7% in the year to June, indicating it doesn’t anticipate much in March. </p>
<p>If next week’s figure is modest, Labor will be able to use it to highlight its case that many people are going backwards in real terms, given the 5.1% inflation rate. </p>
<p>One skill in politics is to be able to turn a negative into a neutral, or a positive, and Albanese did this in the argument over wages and inflation this week. </p>
<p>He initially slipped up, when he embraced the desirability of the minimum hourly wage being increased by 5.1%, to match inflation. The reasons he should not have been so precise have been well canvassed.</p>
<p>But when subsequently he translated such a rise into “two coffees a day”, the proposition would look to many voters more than reasonable (regardless of some counter economic arguments). </p>
<p>Morrison jumped on Albanese’s wages position as evidence the opposition leader did not understand economic matters, with the derogatory put down that “Anthony Albanese is a loose unit on the economy.” But that meant the prime minister was advocating a real wage cut for the lowest paid workers. </p>
<p>The Albanese-as-risk claim is about the best attack line the government has got, but when the debate is about wages, the government is fighting on Labor’s preferred turf. </p>
<p>If Albanese’s campaign has had mistakes and glitches, Morrison’s is undermined by the very obvious fact he’s leading a divided party. </p>
<p>Hardly any Liberals would have heard of Katherine Deves before she shot to prominence as Morrison’s captain’s pick for Warringah. Now her views on transgender issues, which the PM thinks will work for him among some ethnic voters, are causing the Liberals serious internal and external angst. </p>
<p>In a video, former prime minister Tony Abbott, who lost Warringah to independent Zali Steggall in 2019, has urged reluctant Liberal members in the seat to get behind Deves. </p>
<p>“The more I see of Katherine Deves the more impressed I am with her courage, with her common sense, with her decency and with quite frankly her capacity to win this seat back for the Liberal Party,” Abbott says. </p>
<p>Voters’ disgruntlement with Abbott’s high profile campaign against marriage equality was a factor in his defeat in 2019. His words about Deves suggest he remains tone deaf to the views of many in the party and the public within his old seat. </p>
<p>While Abbott lavishes praise on Deves, treasurer Josh Frydenberg, fighting for his political life against a teal candidate in Kooyong, was again distancing himself from Morrison’s defence of her. </p>
<p>“I myself have been very clear in rejecting what Katherine Deves has been saying. Her comments have been insensitive, they’ve been inappropriate,” he reiterated on the ABC. </p>
<p>Morrison has said that in his “captain’s pick” candidates for various NSW seats he was anxious to run women. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://giwl.anu.edu.au/research/publications/election-22-glass-cliff-candidates">study</a> by the Australian National University’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, released Thursday, of candidates from the major parties found only about 20% of female Coalition candidates are running in safe seats. This compares with 46% of male candidates. More than half (51%) of Coalition women candidates are running in marginal seats – under 6% – compared with 25% of male candidates.</p>
<p>Some “80% of female candidates in the Coalition are […] running in seats they are unlikely to win, or that are precarious to hold. The equivalent proportion of men running in these seats is 54%,” the study says.</p>
<p>If the Liberals lose this election, addressing the women problem will be among many issues confronting a shattered party. </p>
<p>Meanwhile women present a major obstacle in Morrison’s attempt to pull this election out of the fire. </p>
<p>The female teal candidates will be attractive to women voters in those seats. More generally, Morrison is significantly more unpopular with women than with men. Women voters could be in the vanguard if May 21 delivers him a mortal blow.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/182953/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Despite Albanese’s campaign hiccups, at the end of this penultimate week, based on the objective evidence, the election appears to be his to lose.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1818372022-04-24T12:36:27Z2022-04-24T12:36:27ZView from The Hill: Could going too negative on ‘teals’ do Liberals more harm than good?<p>As the government fights for its life, John Howard, the Liberals’ living icon, has been on the campaign trail. </p>
<p>It’s not all been smooth sailing for the veteran, however. When Anthony Albanese had his now infamous numbers lapse, Howard’s first reaction was an understanding “So what?” </p>
<p>This undermined the government’s exploitation of Albanese’s gaffe, bringing a quick clean up by Howard the following day. </p>
<p>On Saturday, Howard was campaigning in his old seat of Bennelong, which he lost, with the election, in 2007. </p>
<p>Howard weighed into the “teal” independents. “These men and women are all posing as independents. They’re not independents, they’re anti-Liberal groupies.”</p>
<p>We hadn’t heard the “groupies” sledge before. The government’s favourite attacks have been to say the teals are “fakes” and a vote for them is a vote for Labor. It’s claimed the teals – some of whom do share information and resources – are really a “party”. And it’s deeply frustrating for the Liberals that many of the teals are receiving generous funding from Climate 200.</p>
<p>The Liberals are using sledgehammers against the teals. But in the seats where these independents are considered seriously competitive with the Liberal incumbents, notably North Sydney and Wentworth in Sydney and Goldstein and Kooyong in Melbourne, could such attacks be counterproductive? </p>
<p>In an election when voters are disillusioned with the main parties, including their generally disrespectful tone, the Liberals have to take care in how they mount their arguments against these candidates who are running on issues such as integrity and, at least by implication, advocating a better way of doing the political conversation. </p>
<p>To dismiss them as “groupies” sounds insulting (and somewhat old-fashioned).
Regardless of the arguments for and against their election, many of the teals have impressive backgrounds and present a good deal better than some of the backbenchers who sit behind Scott Morrison. </p>
<p>The suggestion by some of their critics that they’re just a version of Labor is simplistically binary. Allegra Spender (Wentworth) and Kate Chaney (Curtin) come from distinguished Liberal clans. Percy Spender, grandfather of Allegra, was central in the forging of the ANZUS treaty.</p>
<p>The teals are challenged by the government for standing only against Liberal MPs. This isn’t surprising, for a couple of reasons.</p>
<p>The issues at the centre of their campaigns, climate change and an integrity body, are ones on which the government is lagging. </p>
<p>Beyond that, the seats where they have most potential appeal are the Liberal leafy electorates, where many usually-Liberal voters are put off by Morrison. </p>
<p>One would expect many women, especially, in these seats may be attracted to teals who are articulate, professional women like themselves. These female voters would find Morrison’s ultra-blokey style uncongenial and alienating. </p>
<p>What many yet-to-decide voters will want from the Liberals is not insults against the teals but answers to the criticisms they are making of the government. But there are difficulties here – for example, how can a Liberal MP respond to a teal about an integrity commission when the prime minister says he won’t even introduce the integrity legislation unless Labor supports his model, which is almost universally criticised? </p>
<p>The government attacks the teals for not declaring who they would support in a hung parliament. </p>
<p>That might be frustrating some voters and the candidates could pay a price for that. And there is a real issue here. Despite the case made for its virtues, a hung parliament could bring instability and unpredictability. </p>
<p>But would you expect teals to be doing anything other than keeping their powder dry at this stage? </p>
<p>Firstly, in the real world of politics, why would they show their hand, even if they had made a decision? It would throw their campaigns off course. </p>
<p>Secondly, for some teals (as for some of the present crossbenchers assuming they are re-elected) it would depend on the precise details of the hung parliament (who got how many seats, who won the popular vote), and on what was on offer from the two leaders. Spender last week was frank: she hadn’t made a decision, and would want to see what was on the negotiating table.</p>
<p>Both Morrison and Albanese say they would do no deals with crossbenchers in seeking to form government in a hung parliament. Maybe, maybe not. But one would expect most crossbenchers would have plenty of questions for the leaders as they made up their minds to whom they might give confidence and supply.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181837/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As the government fights for its life, John Howard, the Liberals’ living icon, has been on the campaign trail.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1770602022-02-14T06:05:55Z2022-02-14T06:05:55ZForgiveness requires more than just an apology. It requires action<p>It has been 14 years since then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Visit_Parliament/Art/Exhibitions/Custom_Media/Apology_to_Australias_Indigenous_Peoples">apology to the Stolen Generations</a> from parliament house. Words which were so longed for from survivors and descendants of horrific government policies, and which echo through to today.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Scott Morrison’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2022/feb/14/australia-politics-news-live-scott-morrison-anthony-albanese-coronavirus-covid-omicron-weather-nsw-victoria-?CMP=share_btn_tw&page=with:block-6209aa378f082cb98bbaad4a#block-6209aa378f082cb98bbaad4a">speech today</a> on the anniversary of this momentous day made headlines for a different reason. Many have taken umbrage with this line: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sorry is not the hardest word to say. The hardest is ‘I forgive you’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Morrison almost demanding forgiveness belies a false understanding of both how apologies work, and the nature of what it is the government apologised, and is apologising, for. </p>
<p>The policies of the Stolen Generations were acts of government, designed to assimilate us and deprive us of culture. They are also actions which can be remedied by government. To frame the apology in this way is, as Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe tweeted, “outright disrespect”, and “not an apology”.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1493049463166083072"}"></div></p>
<h2>A stain upon the nation</h2>
<p>The Stolen Generations remain a national shame for this country. Over several decades, roughly <a href="https://healingfoundation.org.au/app/uploads/2021/05/Make-Healing-Happen-Report-FINAL-May-2021.pdf">one in five</a> First Nations children were taken from their families between 1910 and 1970, countless communities broken up, and our cultures forcibly suppressed. </p>
<p>In some jurisdictions such as Western Australia, the figure is over one in three First Nations children removed. Nationally, these generations and their descendants make up close to two in five First Nations people, according to a <a href="https://healingfoundation.org.au/make-healing-happen/">report</a> from The Healing Foundation.</p>
<p>The apology, which many thought would not come, and many sadly did not live to see, remains an important part of Australian and First Nations history. Finally the wrongs of the Stolen Generations were not only acknowledged by the government, but apologised for. The apology was, and shall remain, in the <a href="https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/lives-damaged-and-destroyed-pm-apologises-to-one-group/news-story/7efb10fdbe72a51f9ea2cf7e3b0a60b9">words</a> of Linda Burney, a “cultural moment shared by the country”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_Dild-xAzJ0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Kevin Rudd’s 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations was a watershed moment.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/thirteen-years-after-sorry-too-many-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-children-are-still-being-removed-from-their-homes-159360">Thirteen years after 'Sorry', too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are still being removed from their homes</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Apology not without dissent</h2>
<p>However, it is easy to remember the apology as a moment of national unity, free from dissent, which is not the case. John Howard, who proceeded Rudd as prime minister from 1996-2007, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/from-the-archives-1998-thousands-say-sorry-but-not-pm-20210521-p57tyr.html">famously refused</a> such an apology, alongside other measures including a treaty, partly due to the practices of removal being “<a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/john-howard-has-criticised-kevin-rudd-s-2008-apology-to-the-stolen-generations/4cf0aa6f-e71e-4000-a39b-3cc22b641eec">believed to be in the best interests of the children concerned</a>”. </p>
<p>Howard has continued to defend this failure to issue an apology even decades later, declaring the apology “<a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/john-howard-says-kevin-rudd-s-national-apology-to-the-stolen-generations-was-an-an-empty-gesture/92b31fdd-ecdb-486a-b819-5e41e4dd4fd2">meaningless</a>” in a January interview. </p>
<p>Howard was of course, not present in the parliament in 2008, having lost his seat at the 2007 landslide election which saw Labor gain government. However, some members of the Liberal and National parties <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/libs-stage-boycott-as-nelson-heckled-20080214-gds0zo.html">boycotted the event</a>, including controversial former MP Sophie Mirabella, and most notably current Defence Minister Peter Dutton, both of whom have <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/conservatives-comedians-and-political-correctness/10662980">defended their boycott of the apology</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/first-nations-children-are-still-being-removed-at-disproportionate-rates-cultural-assumptions-about-parenting-need-to-change-169090">First Nations children are still being removed at disproportionate rates. Cultural assumptions about parenting need to change</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Action needed to write the wrongs of the past</h2>
<p>For those survivors of the Stolen Generations, and their descendants, the effects of these policies are ongoing, and not confined merely to the removal of children and the destruction of families. </p>
<p>The trauma and pain of these policies, and of being disconnected from country, culture, and community, extends down to their children, and their children’s children. </p>
<p>According to The Healing Foundation’s <a href="https://healingfoundation.org.au/make-healing-happen/">Make Healing Happen report from 2021</a>, Stolen Generations survivors are more likely to not own a home, have worse finances, have experienced violence, suffer from a disability, and to have a criminal record. </p>
<p>Additionally, rates of child removal in Australia have continued to rise over the last decade, with First Nations children <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2021/12/09/theyre-unacceptable-rates-removal-indigenous-children-increasing">ten times more likely</a> to be removed, with over 21,000 in out of home care as of December 2021. This number is projected to increase by a further 54% by 2031. We are going in the wrong direction, and worse, we are doing very little about it. </p>
<p>All of these problems are fixable, and by the government. Presuming forgiveness on the part of those you have wronged, is not going to solve any of these issues. Indeed they are likely to have the opposite effect, reducing the ability of the government to engage with these communities, and impacting upon the mental and physical health of Stolen Generations survivors and their families. </p>
<p>What is needed is a national approach to healing, including reparations for survivors and their descendants (something the government has begun to <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2022/02/08/govt-broadens-eligibility-stolen-generation-reparations-1">deliver on</a>). However, increased services for ageing survivors and a national strategy addressing intergenerational effects of child removal are also needed.</p>
<p>In addition, there needs to be accountability going forward on current child removal practices, with an effort to reduce the number of First Nations children removed, and greater supports and structures for those who are, and a <a href="https://ulurustatement.org/">Voice for First Nations peoples</a> within our political system. </p>
<p>Action is a much greater apology than words. Forgiveness can only truly come when there is action. </p>
<p>Morrison’s comments today show he does not understand that. I’m not sure if he ever will.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177060/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Blackwell is a member of the Australian Greens, and a member of the Uluru Dialogue at UNSW.</span></em></p>Scott Morrison’s comments on the 14th anniversary of the Stolen Generations’ Apology show a lack of understanding of what is really needed to ensure healing for First Nations peoples.James Blackwell, Research Fellow (Indigenous Diplomacy), Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1691542021-10-21T19:15:46Z2021-10-21T19:15:46ZMateship might sound blokey, but our research shows women value it more highly than men<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427682/original/file-20211021-27-d5e4uw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=579%2C19%2C5604%2C4211&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mateship is an intrinsic part of Australian society, routinely discussed as an important national value. In 1999, Prime Minister John Howard even attempted to <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp9900/2000RP16">include mateship in the constitutional preamble</a>. </p>
<p>But despite its ubiquity in Australian culture, what does mateship mean to people and how do they really feel about the term? Our new <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14443058.2021.1982750">Australian Mateship Survey</a> attempted to find out. </p>
<p>In a survey of over 500 respondents, we found that while support for the concept of mateship is high among Australians, many find it problematic.</p>
<p>And surprisingly, women supported the idea of mateship being a key feature of Australian national values more strongly than men (70% and 60%, respectively). This finding stands out since mateship has historic masculine connotations – a perception that was supported by many of our respondents. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1220931440591826945"}"></div></p>
<h2>Short history of mateship in Australia</h2>
<p>Mateship is a common word in many countries, but it has come to have a special meaning in Australian English. The Australian National Dictionary <a href="https://australiannationaldictionary.com.au/oupnewindex1.php">defines</a> it as “the bond between equal partners or close friends; comradeship; comradeship as an ideal”.</p>
<p>While that definition is gender-neutral, mateship has historically been seen as a male domain. One of our respondents succinctly described it as “friendship, but bloke-ier”. </p>
<p>There is a long mythology of mateship in Australia. Canonical bush writers such as Henry Lawson drew on the concept of <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/953357">mateship</a>, enshrining it as part of the Australian bush tradition of the late 19th century. </p>
<p>In the first half of the 20th century, mateship came to be closely associated with the ANZAC legend – and this remains the case today. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"989229740346064897"}"></div></p>
<p>In the 1970s, historian Miriam Dixon, among others, challenged the cultural dominance of mateship and <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2198157">argued</a> it was an exclusionary concept. For Dixon, mateship was “deeply antipathetic to women”. </p>
<p>By the 1990s, Howard claimed the term had outgrown its masculine origins and could be regarded as an inclusive national ideal. Nevertheless, his plan to include the term in the constitutional preamble was roundly criticised and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/stories/s43018.htm">ultimately abandoned</a>. </p>
<p>The purpose of our research was to test attitudes towards mateship two decades after this public debate to see how people view it today.</p>
<h2>Positive feelings on mateship – except when used by politicians</h2>
<p>Our survey posed a series of questions that sought to determine if and how respondents used the term “mate”, whether they believed mateship was important in Australia, and how people defined it. </p>
<p>A strong majority of respondents (82%) said they use the word “mate” in conversation and nearly 65% responded yes when asked, “Is mateship a key feature of Australian national identity?”. Many respondents also had positive things to say about mateship in their comments. </p>
<p>Our survey also showed women overall had a slightly more positive view of mateship compared to men and non-binary or gender-fluid respondents, despite the fact many women found the term to be too “blokey”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/get-yer-hand-off-it-mate-australian-slang-is-not-dying-90022">Get yer hand off it, mate, Australian slang is not dying</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>While mateship is seen as a positive Australian value by most, we found there is suspicion when politicians try to gain political mileage from it. </p>
<p>When asked if politicians should invoke mateship in national rituals such as speeches on Australia Day and ANZAC Day, only 45% of our respondents said yes. </p>
<p>Without mentioning the phrase’s origin with the Howard government’s proposed addition to the constitutional preamble in 1999, respondents were asked if they supported the line, “<a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp9900/2000RP16">We value excellence as well as fairness, independence as dearly as mateship</a>”. Only 39% said yes. </p>
<h2>Mateship and exclusion</h2>
<p>While most of our respondents (60%) said they believed mateship includes “all Australians”, a sizeable minority said the term is exclusive on gender and racial lines. </p>
<p>Many of the comments associated mateship not only with men, but specifically with white men. One respondent described it as “a dog whistle for white nationalism and misogyny”. Others suggested mateship was “too white male-centric” and “mateship feels like a boy’s club, specifically for white men”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/paul-hogan-and-the-myth-of-the-white-aussie-bloke-124281">Paul Hogan and the myth of the white Aussie bloke</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This perhaps reflects a sense of distrust people feel when mateship is used in political discourse. Australia’s political leaders are predominantly white and male, and regularly use the language of mateship to speak of solidarity and political community. </p>
<p>Like Howard, recent leaders have attempted to harness its cultural power. In fact, then-Treasurer Scott Morrison <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansardr/b15942d6-e86a-4a01-8094-d46337096349/&sid=0040">said in parliament</a> in late 2015 that “mateship is the Australian word for love”.</p>
<p>Our survey shows there are many Australians concerned with attempts to force mateship as a civic ideal, as political rhetoric often does.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1174809990323851264"}"></div></p>
<h2>The future of mateship</h2>
<p>Although mateship is largely seen as a positive feature of Australian life, defining it is difficult and attempts to politicise it are generally frowned upon. </p>
<p>Our survey also found that, for a significant minority, the exclusionary connotations of mateship are too strong for it to be a unifying civic ideal. For many of our respondents – as with critics of Howard’s constitutional preamble – the term has not outgrown its sexist and exclusionary baggage.</p>
<p>In his <a href="https://theconversation.com/book-review-mateship-a-very-australian-history-35858">history of mateship</a>, Nick Dyrenfurth notes it has always been contested. The diverse range of responses to our survey support this. </p>
<p>As a result, we believe that political attempts to take ownership of mateship and enshrine a particular definition as a civic ideal are more likely to divide than unite.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169154/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Although mateship is largely seen as a positive feature of Australian life, defining it is difficult and attempts to politicise it are generally frowned upon.Naama Carlin, Lecturer, UNSW SydneyAmanda Laugesen, Director, Australian National Dictionary Centre, Australian National UniversityBenjamin T. Jones, Senior Lecturer in History, CQUniversity AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1695452021-10-15T01:06:01Z2021-10-15T01:06:01ZClimate wars, carbon taxes and toppled leaders: the 30-year history of Australia’s climate response, in brief<p>Time is rapidly running out for the Morrison government to announce a new climate policy before the United Nations COP26 climate talks in Glasgow next month. At the 11th hour, the government appears poised to announce a net-zero emissions target for 2050 and, possibly, stronger ambition to 2030.</p>
<p>Infamously, Australia has to date failed to sustain a meaningful climate policy regime. As <a href="https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.725?af=R">my latest research</a> has shown, inaction by the federal government has been a particularly effective handbrake on progress. So any new climate targets, and a robust plan to meet them, would be welcome.</p>
<p>The challenge now for the Morrison government is to consign Australia’s fractious climate politics divide to history. The mistakes of the past must be avoided. A new approach is needed, one that delivers on net-zero, with a 2030 target that signals Australia’s intent to join the world in taking climate change seriously.</p>
<p>There is much to learn from analysis of Australia’s poor record, in particular from the divisive “climate wars” which plagued federal politics over the last decade. But Australia’s policy recalcitrance stretches way back, at least 30 years. </p>
<p>To help us understand what’s at stake for Australia at Glasgow and beyond, here’s a quick refresher. </p>
<hr>
<p><iframe id="tc-infographic-613" class="tc-infographic" height="400px" src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/infographics/613/2fa424506185882d66a35e3e01e63d0bc3190f95/site/index.html" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<hr>
<h2>Cast your mind back 30 years</h2>
<p>In her <a href="https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p303951/pdf/book.pdf">detailed history</a> of climate awareness in Australia, academic and journalist Maria Taylor found, through document and interview-based analysis, that as far back as the late 1980s, the Australian public was the best informed on the planet of the urgent need to act on global warming.</p>
<p>She recalls the Hawke Labor government set a target of reducing emissions 20% below 1988 levels by 2005. However, the impetus was lost under the Keating Labor government as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/17/remembering-the-recession-the-1990s-experience-changed-my-view-of-the-world">economic recession hit</a>, and concerns about the cost of climate action grew – in particular from the resources industry.</p>
<p>The late 1990s, under the Howard Coalition government, were also lost to inaction. At the 1997 Kyoto climate negotiations, <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22media%2Fpressrel%2F5B676%22;src1=sm1">Australia demanded</a> a target that <a href="https://mitpress.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7551/mitpress/9780262014267.001.0001/upso-9780262014267-chapter-7">allowed</a> emissions in 2012 to be 8% more than they were in 1990, while developed nations, other than Norway and Iceland, agreed to cut theirs. Australia threatened to <a href="https://theconversation.com/today-australias-kyoto-climate-targets-end-and-our-paris-cop-out-begins-thats-nothing-to-be-proud-of-mr-taylor-131137">walk away</a> from the negotiations if that was not agreed to.</p>
<p>Despite Australia’s demands being met, the Howard government then failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/howard-defiant-on-kyoto-rejection-20020905-gduk81.html">the only</a> developed nation other than the United States to do so. </p>
<p>It did introduce a renewable energy target and propose a carbon tax, prior to losing the 2007 election, as an Australian public gripped by drought sought stronger action on climate change. </p>
<p>The Rudd Labor government <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajph.12021">ratified</a> the Kyoto Protocol in 2007. It also attempted to set a carbon price, in the form of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). But the bill <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-08-13/wong-defiant-as-senate-rejects-carbon-trade-laws/1389416">failed</a> to pass Parliament after the Coalition and the Greens blocked it in the Senate.</p>
<p>In 2011, the Gillard Labor minority government passed the <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:%22media/pressrel/915157%22">Clean Energy Act</a> negotiated with her crossbench supporters. This established a carbon pricing mechanism, which critics wrongly <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/carbon-tax-just-brutal-politics-credlin">branded</a> a “carbon tax”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/25-years-ago-the-australian-government-promised-deep-emissions-cuts-and-yet-here-we-still-are-46805">25 years ago the Australian government promised deep emissions cuts, and yet here we still are</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Abbott years</h2>
<p>The Coalition opposition, led by Tony Abbott, was circling. Ever the <a href="https://theconversation.com/malcolm-turnbull-and-his-emissions-trading-scheme-shadow-48198">climate policy pugilist</a>, Abbott pledged to “<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-spectator/news-story/will-abbott-axe-the-tax/eccabf3032531411299c7811c6b01e37">axe the tax</a>” and repeal other climate policy advances. At the 2013 federal election, he rode those promises into office.</p>
<p>The Abbott government was the first in the world to <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25919-australia-will-pay-dearly-for-repealing-its-carbon-tax/">repeal a carbon price</a>. Gone also were <a href="https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wcc.458">other advances</a>, such as the expert Climate Commission, support for wind and solar power, and policies to promote energy efficiency. </p>
<p>The new government’s dismantling closed Australia’s window of opportunity to act on climate change. But the world was moving on. By 2015 international leaders were <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/paris-2015-tony-abbott-viewed-by-french-as-reluctant-actor-on-climate-change-20150609-ghjftr.html">calling for</a> an end to coal and for steep policy action under the Paris Agreement.</p>
<p>Abbott was deposed as prime minister in 2015 after two years in office. But his dismantling efforts dramatically slowed the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, which was <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341975/thethirdindustrialrevolution">progressing apace</a> in other advanced industrial economies.</p>
<p>Abbott’s successor, Malcolm Turnbull, understood this. But his efforts to move on climate change were thwarted by internal party politics and dissent, and in 2018 he too was <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/turnbull-says-his-biggest-leadership-failure-was-on-climate-change-83289/">deposed</a>.</p>
<h2>It’s up to Scott Morrison</h2>
<p>Given this tumultuous history, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been cautious <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/sep/05/scott-morrison-contradicts-energy-advice-saying-paris-targets-can-be-met-at-a-canter">not to signal</a> abrupt climate policy change. But now, with the international summit just weeks away, he is <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-net-zero-bandwagon-is-gathering-steam-and-resistant-mps-are-about-to-be-run-over-169632">staring down the Coalition’s naysayers</a> in the National Party to pledge a target of net-zero emissions by 2050.</p>
<p>The political conversation on climate change is finally changing. Even the conservative federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg <a href="https://theconversation.com/josh-frydenberg-prepares-ground-for-scott-morrison-to-commit-to-2050-climate-target-168610">recently articulated</a> the economic costs of not making the low-emissions transition.</p>
<p>But 30 years of inaction has left Australia lagging without a long-term target or an effective 2030 target to guide interim action, including a phase-out of coal. So Australia risks being <a href="https://climateactiontracker.org/publications/scalingupaustralia/">left behind</a>, missing out on the jobs and growth from a low-carbon transition. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-cop26-and-why-does-the-fate-of-earth-and-australias-prosperity-depend-on-it-169648">What is COP26 and why does the fate of Earth, and Australia's prosperity, depend on it?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>To see bone fide change in Australia’s climate response, the government must not repeat the mistakes of the past: politicising climate change, delaying the clean energy transition, persisting with ineffective policies, and offsetting rather than reducing emissions. </p>
<p>Instead, it should set partisanship aside and develop enduring economic and energy transition plans for affected communities, such as those vulnerable to drought, low-lying coastal communities, and coal workers set to lose their jobs. These plans mustn’t be reversed for political gain, as we’ve seen in the past. </p>
<p>Jurisdictions such as the European Union are planning or considering trade sanctions such as <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/we-wont-be-uncle-sucker-us-to-join-eu-with-carbon-tax-on-imports/">carbon border adjustments</a> on nations that don’t reduce emissions. And <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/australia-coal-rba-idUSKBN2GC0SX">stranded fossil fuel investments</a> are inevitable as the market shifts towards renewables. Clearly, inaction on climate change <a href="https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/deadly-costs-climate-inaction">will cost Australia</a> dearly.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/economists-back-carbon-price-say-benefits-of-net-zero-outweigh-costs-169939">Economists back carbon price, say benefits of net-zero outweigh costs</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169545/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate Crowley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Click through a timeline to make sense of Australia’s long, tumultuous years of shifting climate policies ahead of next month’s international climate summit in Glasgow.Kate Crowley, Associate Professor, Public and Environmental Policy, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1653142021-08-12T20:02:15Z2021-08-12T20:02:15ZFriday essay: Our utopia … careful what you wish for<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415223/original/file-20210809-23-10wntby.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=21%2C31%2C1556%2C1223&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A slide by Gordon H. Woodhouse to accompany a 1901 lecture by his father Clarence entitled 'exploration and development of Australia'.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1cl35st/SLV_VOYAGER1752211">State Library of Victoria</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Roman Quaedvlieg <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-01/border-force-commissioner-operational-matters-roman-quaedvlieg/6586274">standing tall in his smart black suit</a> — medals glistening, insignia flashing — looked every bit the man-in-uniform from central casting when he posed between then Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton on 1 July 2015 to launch a new paramilitary unit to protect Australia’s borders. </p>
<p>Australian Border Force was modelled on a similar agency created in Britain two years earlier but with a distinctive accent. Its <a href="https://osb.homeaffairs.gov.au/">Operation Sovereign Borders</a> had changed the culture of military, policing and customs agencies in Australia as they were pushed out of their silos with a new shared priority: stop refugees arriving by boat. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414712/original/file-20210805-17-6kt9sy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414712/original/file-20210805-17-6kt9sy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414712/original/file-20210805-17-6kt9sy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414712/original/file-20210805-17-6kt9sy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414712/original/file-20210805-17-6kt9sy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414712/original/file-20210805-17-6kt9sy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414712/original/file-20210805-17-6kt9sy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414712/original/file-20210805-17-6kt9sy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Just 14 months earlier Scott Morrison, then the Immigration Minister, had <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-27/we-will-stop-the-boats-promise-check/5474206?nw=0">announced</a> the formation of the new armed and uniformed force, describing it as the “reform dividend from stopping the boats”. </p>
<p>The 70 year-old department had gained a new role: “Border Protection”. The old tags — “Multiculturalism”, “Citizenship” and “Ethnic Affairs” — were artefacts of other ages when population growth coupled with social cohesion had been the goal. The armed Border Force that had emerged out of the chrysalis of the old customs service, complete with new uniforms, ranks and insignia, on that mid-winter day was another sign of Canberra’s increasing preoccupation with security and militarisation. </p>
<p>Fear and safety were still at the heart of the political narrative just as they had been for most of the time since 2001, when Prime Minister John Howard won an unlikely election victory by declaring over and over: “<a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:%22library/partypol/1178395%22">We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come</a>”. </p>
<p>He liked to reassure people that Australia would still be taking more than its share of refugees, but the proportion of overseas-born residents fell over the early years of his prime ministership. After decades of multiculturalism the Australian ear was once again being attuned to new arrivals as threat.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cruel-costly-and-ineffective-australias-offshore-processing-asylum-seeker-policy-turns-9-166014">Cruel, costly and ineffective: Australia's offshore processing asylum seeker policy turns 9</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Taking it to the streets</h2>
<p>By 2015, Australia’s proportion of overseas-born residents was nudging the all-time high of 30% reached in the 1890s, but multiculturalism was still a grubby word. </p>
<p>Without irony, Commissioner Quaedvlieg cut to the chase, reducing the new nearly 6,000-strong agency’s role to its essence: “to protect our utopia”. Decades before, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin had <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=krN_n7UpJI0C&lpg=PA20&ots=wt6iRtQdd3&dq=The%20idea%20of%20a%20perfect%20society%20is%20a%20very%20old%20dream%2C%20whether%20because%20of%20the%20ills%20of%20the%20present%20which%20lead%20men%20to%20conceive%20what%20their%20world%20would%20be%20like%20without%20them&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=The%20idea%20of%20a%20perfect%20society%20is%20a%20very%20old%20dream,%20whether%20because%20of%20the%20ills%20of%20the%20present%20which%20lead%20men%20to%20conceive%20what%20their%20world%20would%20be%20like%20without%20them&f=false">elegantly demolished the idea of utopias</a>, suggesting they were “a fiction deliberately constructed as satires intended to shame those who control existing regimes”. </p>
<p>A month after the launch of Border Force, its first big public exercise, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/border-force-fiasco-operation-fortitude-cancelled-as-protest-shuts-down-melbourne-streets-20150828-gjah7n.html">Operation Fortitude</a>, was announced. Officers were to walk the streets of Melbourne and seek proof of the right of residence of “any individual we cross paths with”. The warning was clear: If you commit border fraud you should know it’s only a matter of time before you are caught. </p>
<p>The residents of the Melbourne branch of “our utopia” fought back with a dose of theatricality, to prove Berlin’s point, and the joint operation with the Victorian Police was abandoned in a flurry of protests and press releases. Prime Minister Abbott <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/prime-minister-tony-abbott-says-border-force-operation-fortitude-was-a-mistake-20150829-gjammd.html">declared</a>, “Nothing happened here except the issue of a poorly worded press release”. </p>
<p>Within a couple of years, the uniformed commissioner from central casting had gone. The intent, however, remained clear. Immigration might be at an all-time high, but exclusion was still the key, and national security was at the centre of Australian public life.</p>
<h2>Ills of the past and present</h2>
<p>Deciding who could come and the circumstances under which they could enter the country has, as we have been again reminded during COVID times, been central to the management of the Australian utopia since 1901. </p>
<p>Again <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/87435.The_Crooked_Timber_of_Humanity?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=VF2HdXEbmH&rank=9">Isaiah Berlin</a> notes the: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] idea of the perfect society is a very old dream, whether because of the ills of the present which lead men to conceive what their world would be like without them … or perhaps they are social fantasies – simple exercises in the poetical imagination. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Australia at the time of Federation was awash with bad poetry by mediocre poets. So if conceiving the nation as a utopia was an exercise of the poetical imagination, it was inevitably flawed.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415199/original/file-20210809-17-gj6vul.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="drawing of crowd" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415199/original/file-20210809-17-gj6vul.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415199/original/file-20210809-17-gj6vul.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415199/original/file-20210809-17-gj6vul.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415199/original/file-20210809-17-gj6vul.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415199/original/file-20210809-17-gj6vul.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415199/original/file-20210809-17-gj6vul.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415199/original/file-20210809-17-gj6vul.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tom Roberts’ depiction of the opening of the first Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia May 9, 1901, By H.R.H. The Duke of Cornwall and York at Melbourne’s Exhibition Buildings.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1cl35st/SLV_VOYAGER1660125">State Library of Victoria/Tom Roberts</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The first step towards the creation of Australia’s white utopia was brutal and relentless. It depended on the humiliation and elimination, by design and neglect, of the million First Nations people who in 1788 still called the continent home as they had done for countless generations, managed with an elaborate, ancient patchwork of languages, social relations, trade and lore. </p>
<p>Although the Australian Constitution explicitly excluded them from the census, by the time the <a href="https://aifs.gov.au/facts-and-figures/population-and-households">3.7 million</a> new arrivals became Australians in 1901, the First Nations population <a href="https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/people/aboriginal-population-in-australia#toc0">had been reduced</a>, systematically and deliberately, to about 90,000 people.</p>
<p>The men who debated the legislation that would shape the new nation preferred to avert their eyes. They were not, however, ignorant of what had gone before. </p>
<p>Even in a world shaped by race there was argument, opposition and some shame. Months after Australia became legally, unequivocally white, the parliament debated whether to recognise the survivors who preceded them. </p>
<p>The senate leader and future High Court justice <a href="https://biography.senate.gov.au/richard-edward-oconnor/">Richard O’Connor</a> argued that just as the right to vote was being extended to women — because in some states, they already had the franchise — the same principle should apply to Aboriginal people who had the right to vote in four of the former colonies. “It would be a monstrous thing, an unheard-of piece of savagery”, he declared, “to treat the Aboriginals whose land we were occupying to deprive them absolutely of any right to vote in their own country”.</p>
<p>Not everyone agreed. The former Tasmanian premier <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/braddon-sir-edward-nicholas-coventry-5330">Edward Braddon</a> summed up the <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=5zHAGNPTkqIC&lpg=PA121&ots=PSKZmhnR3f&dq=Evans%2C%20R%20'Pigmentia%E2%80%99%3A%20Racial%20fears%20and%20white%20Australia%2C%20Berghahn%20Books%3B%20Meaney%2C%20The%20Sydney%20Morning%20Herald%2C%2013%20March%201913.&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=pigmentia&f=false">majority sentiment</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are told we have taken their country from them. But it seems a poor sort of justice to recompense those people for the loss of the country by giving them votes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This argument prevailed. White women and Maori were the only <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/archive/women#:%7E:text=Section%204%20of%20the%20Commonwealth,she%20was%20already%20entitled%20to">exceptions</a>: “no aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific” could enrol to vote. Within its first two years, the parliament had failed two moral tests.</p>
<p>At the heart of the Australia embraced by those who met in Melbourne in the Federation Parliament was the idea of a model society populated by men like them. Utopian dreams had played out in many ways in shaping the new nation. A decade earlier, nearly 300 colonialists sailed to Paraguay in a flawed attempt to create a more perfect, and even whiter, society called <a href="https://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/objectsthroughtime/1893-the-new-australia-colony-collection/index.html">New Australia</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415210/original/file-20210809-23-1b1xmra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="black and white photo of huts" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415210/original/file-20210809-23-1b1xmra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415210/original/file-20210809-23-1b1xmra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415210/original/file-20210809-23-1b1xmra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415210/original/file-20210809-23-1b1xmra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415210/original/file-20210809-23-1b1xmra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415210/original/file-20210809-23-1b1xmra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415210/original/file-20210809-23-1b1xmra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Looking for an even whiter utopia, several hundred people set off for Paraguay to establish the New Australia colony between 1892–1905.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/3532740438/in/photolist-6obdDU">Flickr/State Library of NSW</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Prime Minister Edmund Barton, in the middle of the first year of the century, firmly <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/APF/monographs/Within_Chinas_Orbit/Chapterone">grounded the new nation</a> in the “instinct of self-preservation quickened by experience”. Optimism tempered by fear. </p>
<p>What became known as the White Australia policy was necessary, he said, because “we know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year’s surplus population”. </p>
<p>Future prime minister Billy Hughes spelt out the two steps of this dance when he <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/15404648">candidly observed</a> that having “killed everybody else to get it”, the inauguration of Canberra — which they considered calling Utopia — as the national capital “was unfolding without the slightest trace of the race we have banished from the face of the earth […] we should not be too proud lest we should too in time disappear. We must take steps to safeguard the foothold we now have”.</p>
<h2>Fresh eyes</h2>
<p>In 1923 Myra Willard — a recent graduate of the University of Sydney — paid Melbourne University Press to publish its first monograph, her book <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/history-of-the-white-australia-policy-to-1920-paperback-softback">History of the White Australia Policy to 1920</a>. She wrote with a contemporaneous eye. </p>
<p>The debates in the colonies before Federation were still close enough for the lines between them and the 1901 legislation to be thickly etched with detail. She grimly recounted the way each colony penalised and excluded “coolies” and “celestials”.</p>
<p>“The desire to guard themselves effectively against the dangers of Asiatic immigration was one of the most powerful influences which drew the Colonies together,” she wrote. She quoted with approval the now infamous speech by Attorney-General Alfred Deakin in which he described the principle of white Australia as the “universal motive power” that had dissolved colonial opposition to Federation. At heart, he <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/APF/monographs/Within_Chinas_Orbit/Chapterone">declared</a>, was “the desire that we should be one people and remain one people without the admixture of other races”.</p>
<p>The Australian utopia depended on a “united race”. This would be ensured by “prohibiting the intermarriage and association that could degrade”. As Deakin declaimed in September that year, “inspired by the same ideas and an aspiration towards the same ideals of a people possessing a cast of character, tone of thought … unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia”.</p>
<p>The legislation was finally, if somewhat reluctantly, signed by Governor General Lord Hopetoun just before Christmas 1901. London was discomfited by the determination of the new nation to exclude and proposed amendments to save face with her imperial allies in Europe and Japan. Willard wrote in 1923, “Australia’s policy does not as yet seem to be generally understood or sanctioned by world opinion”. It was, she maintained, despite the negative connotations, really a positive policy that ensured Australia would be a productive global contributor of resources and supplies.</p>
<p>By the time the legislation passed, those with Chinese heritage were fewer than they had been in the 19th century. It did not take long before Indian residents who had lived in Fremantle for years, as British subjects, were denied the right to return to Australia after visiting their homeland. Those of German heritage, who made up about 5% of the population at the turn of the century, soon became pariahs — wartime internment was followed by the deportation of 6,000 Australians of German heritage.</p>
<p>Gough Whitlam <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/end-of-white-australia-policy">revoked</a> the policy as one of his first acts as prime minister. </p>
<p>“Right up to our election in 1972”, he <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/756135.100_Years">recalled</a>, “there had to be, from any country outside Europe, an application for entry referred to Canberra and a confidential report on their appearance […] The photograph wasn’t enough, because by a strong light or powdering you could reduce the colour of your exposed parts. It was said that the test was in extreme cases, ‘Drop your daks’ because you can’t change the colour of your bum’.” </p>
<p>For Michael Wesley, now deputy vice chancellor international at the University of Melbourne, and thousands of others, this meant that his Australian-born mother could return home with her Indian husband and brown babies without fear of deportation.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/german-experience-in-australia-during-ww1-damaged-road-to-multiculturalism-38594">German experience in Australia during WW1 damaged road to multiculturalism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The echoes still resonate. Fast forward to this year, when the average time in immigration detention rose to 627 days and the then Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/peter-dutton-defends-decision-to-deport-minor-to-new-zealand-following-backlash-over-trash-comments">described</a> deporting New Zealand-born long-term Australian residents who had been jailed as “taking the trash out”. </p>
<p>The suite of bills passed in that first parliament — at least as much as the Constitution — determined the social nature of Australia for much of the 20th century. As Deakin said a couple of years after the White Australia policy was adopted, “it goes down to the roots of our national existence, the roots from which the British social system has sprung”. </p>
<p>By the time he was prime minister, the bureaucratic method of exclusion was even <a href="https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1903-alfred-deakin">clearer</a>: “the object of the [language] test is not to allow persons to enter the Commonwealth, but to keep them out”. John Howard could not have asked for a better crib sheet than the speeches of the Federation Parliament when preparing his 2001 election campaign.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FxlunUpz-Nc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘It’s about this nation saying to the world, we are a generous open-hearted people … but we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-the-white-australia-policy-74084">Australian politics explainer: the White Australia policy</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Survival against the odds</h2>
<p>That Australia has emerged as a cohesive multicultural society, with people drawn from hundreds of different countries — and increasingly from those that were once explicitly excluded — is a remarkable achievement. That the First Nations people have survived is in many ways even more remarkable. </p>
<p>But the foundation story of our notional utopia is still undigested and recurs unwittingly in policy language and political rhetoric, in legal and administrative practice and personal abuse. </p>
<p>The brutal speed and wilful political rejection of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-has-brought-a-global-reckoning-with-history-this-is-why-the-uluru-statement-is-so-crucial-149974">Uluru Statement from the Heart</a> would have shamed even the members of the Federation Parliament; the failure to turn enquiry into action on the oldest issue in the land — treaty, truth-telling and settlement with the descendants of those who have always been here — is unconscionable. </p>
<p>Methods of border control are now more likely to be couched in the convoluted small print attached to visas, employment conditions and bureaucratic processes, but at some level the old order prevails — there has been no national apology to those who were humiliated by the White Australia policy, no formal truth-telling to address these sins of the past at a national level. It has taken 23 years for the compensation recommended by Stolen Children inquiry to be parsimoniously granted.</p>
<p>Hands are thrown up in mock astonishment when another example of institutional or official racism, discrimination or maltreatment makes the headlines. Over a decade, the cost of detaining (and breaking) those refugees who felt compelled to leave their homeland reached double-digit billions. <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/01/21/australia-address-abuses-raised-un-review">International criticism</a> is once again worn with bravado as a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame. It was surprisingly easy to jettison 50 years of careful relationship-building with China.</p>
<p>Ever since those first debates in the Federation Parliament there has been a moral deficit in Australian politics, a reluctance to go back to first principles, to meaningfully make amends. Until this is addressed there will always be an action deficit. The big public health campaigns have not extended to addressing the lingering racism that has equally pernicious consequences. </p>
<p>No national political leaders rose to the defence of Adam Goodes when the 2014 Australian of the Year was called “an ape” and booed off the footy field. None came to the defence of <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/yassmin-abdelmagied-on-becoming-australias-most-publicly-hated-muslim-20170816-gxxb7d.htmlv">Yassmin Abdel-Magied</a> when she sought to contribute to public life. The response to the never-ending list of Aboriginal deaths in custody is couched in mealy-mouthed administrivia. </p>
<p>When Prime Minister Julia Gillard was battered by misogynist hectoring, the message to other women was clear: don’t get ideas above your station. Almost every week a woman dies at the hands of her intimate partner, but overwhelmed police seem powerless to help. </p>
<p>Our treatment of refugees attracts a global condemnation that is dismissed as readily today as it was in 1901. Behrouz Boochani will probably never set foot in the country he described so searingly in his much awarded <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39284186-no-friend-but-the-mountains?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=LjTkWE6v8u&rank=1">No Friend but the Mountains</a>, and despite public support, the Murugappans — <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56768529">the Biloela family</a> — spent nearly three years in costly detention on Christmas Island. </p>
<p>Yet when the government banned Australian citizens and permanent residents who happened to be in India as COVID raged from returning home under threat of fines and jail terms, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/may/01/coalition-condemned-for-outrageous-decision-to-fine-or-imprison-australians-returning-from-india">outcry</a> was impossible to ignore. </p>
<p>The brutality of the old ways still lives in the memory. A colleague recalled her traumatic fear, during the family’s first trip to India with their Pakistani-born father, that the White Australia policy would be reintroduced and they would be denied re-entry. It had happened to those returning to Fremantle Harbour a century earlier — and, astonishingly, again in 2021.</p>
<h2>Utopia out of step</h2>
<p>Public sentiment is at odds with that of those who are most committed to the old status quo. Survey after survey shows a populace willing to embrace change that means people are treated better. But there are few leaders willing to make the case, fearful of an imagined backlash, rather than embracing the need for big tough conversation. Transformation is left to the slow accretion of a new normal. </p>
<p>Tens of thousands turned up at the football waving “<a href="https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/istandwithadam-social-media-campaign-rallies-for-sydney-swans-star-adam-goodes-20150801-gip9p9.html">I stand with Adam</a>” banners years before the AFL officially apologised to Goodes. </p>
<p>Those affronted by official treatment of refugees engage in endless protest campaigns, travel to detention centres, provide support and lobby. The Black Lives Matter movement has galvanised some of the biggest demonstrations seen in the country, despite COVID, and the calls for action on the unfinished business of the 33-old Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the other inquiries are becoming impossible to ignore.</p>
<p>There is much to be learnt from First Nations people. Their survival and generosity is an inspiration that needs to be taken seriously and acted upon. Without righting this foundational wrong, this country will be forever stuck on a political treadmill, running but going nowhere.</p>
<h2>Art speaks volumes</h2>
<p>It is striking that one of the most important Aboriginal artists to have captivated the world came from a place called <a href="https://www.rahc.com.au/sites/default/files/documents/community_profiles/Utopia%20Community%20Profile.pdf">Utopia</a>. Hers was the land of the Alyawarr people for millennia before its brief life as a cattle station. It is a place as impoverished as any of the remote settlements in northern Australia, returned to their traditional owners with only grudging support from the state. But the semi-arid country is the source of dreaming and a culture that speaks to the world when brought to life on canvas. <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/utopia/emily-kame-kngwarreye">Emily Kame Kngwarreye</a>’s paintings are displayed in galleries, palaces and private collections around the world. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415191/original/file-20210809-27-r9u8wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Indigenous painting" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415191/original/file-20210809-27-r9u8wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415191/original/file-20210809-27-r9u8wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415191/original/file-20210809-27-r9u8wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415191/original/file-20210809-27-r9u8wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415191/original/file-20210809-27-r9u8wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415191/original/file-20210809-27-r9u8wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415191/original/file-20210809-27-r9u8wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One of Australia’s most famous contemporary paintings, Earth’s Creation 1, by Emily Kame Kngwarreye.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://photos-cdn.aap.com.au/Preview/20171116001324130248?assetType=IMAGE&path=/aap_dev6/device/imagearc/2017/11-16/d8/07/4c/aapimage-6xkxsl8bf9v1favm02vt_minihighres.jpg">AAP Image/Emily Kame Kngwarreye</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They are more than great works of art. It is what Australian art always aspired to be. In the <a href="https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/1387/homeland-sacred-visions-and-the-settler-state/">words</a> of the influential Aboriginal scholar and advocate Marcia Langton, Emily’s paintings</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] fulfil the primary historical function of Australian art by showing the settler Australian audience, caught ambiguously between old and new lands, a new way to belong in this place rather than another […] </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Creating a utopia, or at least an aspiration to do better, requires more imagination and courage than our current system of professional politics permits. </p>
<p>It needs more art and better faith. Politics, like everything else, is now in thrall to corporate modes of organisation and communication. </p>
<p>The emphasis is on the mission (to get elected) and KPIs (to deliver on promises). The headline of every corporate plan is the “vision”. It is always the hardest thing to define. But without a vision, any plan is meaningless. Our utopia needs a new vision, one not tinged by shame. The old ones have failed the test of time.</p>
<p><em>This is an edited extract of Facing foundational wrongs — careful what you wish for, republished with permission from <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/editions/hey-utopia/">GriffithReview73: Hey Utopia!</a>, edited by Ashley Hay.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165314/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julianne Schultz is Professor of Media and Culture at Griffith University, publisher and founding editor of Griffith Review and chair of The Conversation Media Group. Her book The Idea of Australia: a search for the soul of the nation will be published by Allen and Unwin.
</span></em></p>Exclusion has been central to utopian ideas of Australia since before Federation. It still lingers. To progress in this climate-challenged century, Australia’s foundational wrongs must be righted.Julianne Schultz, Professor of Media and Culture, Griffith University, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1651692021-08-05T20:09:53Z2021-08-05T20:09:53ZA ‘Christian nation’ no longer: why Australia’s religious right loses policy battles even when it wins elections<p>Conservative Christians are prominent in Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition parties. Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott are two of the most <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/27/scott-morrison-is-a-pentecostal-but-he-doesnt-need-believers-like-trump-does">devout</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/lets-be-clear-on-tony-abbotts-attacks-on-abortion-10263">theologically conservative</a> prime ministers in Australian history.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2021/06/26/how-the-religious-right-trying-take-over-the-liberal-party/162462960011952">State</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/06/christian-soldiers-and-climate-deniers-inside-the-fight-for-control-of-the-queensland-lnp">Coalition parties</a> <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/liberal-survivor-puts-spotlight-on-right-wing-churches-20210315-p57au7">have had</a> <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/conservative-christian-plot-to-take-control-of-nsw-liberal-party-20190807-p52evl.html">influxes</a> of <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/the-religious-minority-seizing-power-in-the-liberal-party-20180601-p4ziyq.html">religious conservatives</a> as the Coalition <a href="https://www.eternitynews.com.au/australia/can-christian-political-parties-survive/">absorbs</a> Christian parties and their voters. At the same time, the Christian right is suffering major defeats on its biggest issues. </p>
<p>Since 2018, <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/abortion-has-been-decriminalised-in-queensland/cc85e428-90a1-42f2-9156-87f0249c00f7">Queensland</a>, <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/abortion-has-been-decriminalised-in-nsw-and-here-s-what-will-actually-change/fa9150ff-295f-432e-9361-4dad576f3d0a">New South Wales</a> and <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/historic-day-for-women-as-abortion-officially-decriminalised-in-south-australia">South Australia</a> have all liberalised their abortion laws. This happened under Coalition governments in NSW and SA, to the dismay of some conservatives. Abbott and Barnaby Joyce <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-15/tony-abbott-tells-rally-abortion-laws-are-effecively-infanticide/11514890">appeared at protests</a> against the NSW laws. Morrison <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/scott-morrison-a-conservative-on-abortion/6767a1b4-a32d-4822-b9e4-4cc71afa5aea">declined to get involved</a>, despite his “conservative” views on abortion.</p>
<p>In the 2017 postal survey on marriage equality, only <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2017/November/Australian_Marriage_Law_Postal_Survey_map">five of the Coalition’s 76 federal seats</a> saw majorities vote “no”. The law subsequently passed <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-08/same-sex-marriage-who-didnt-vote/9240584">with the support of most Coalition MPs</a>.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09637494.2021.1946344">new article</a> in Religion, State and Society, I examine why Australian Christian conservatives are losing policy battles even when they win elections. Compared to the <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/scot-mcknight/2020/august/lets-talk-about-christian-nationalism.html">United States</a>, Australia does not have a strong link between Christianity and nationalism. I show that, if anything, the concept of Australia as a “Christian nation” has declined over the past decade. This makes it harder for religious traditionalism to piggyback on the electoral success of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/17/australians-are-asking-how-did-we-get-here-well-islamophobia-is-practically-enshrined-as-public-policy?CMP=share_btn_tw&fbclid=IwAR2GXTs83zEY3EX0LLQhNPzpYGSc7vv3XRMXaiIWGnw9VEjatJSbOGCRfvw">exclusionary nationalism</a>.</p>
<h2>The rise and fall of the Christian right</h2>
<p>Religious adherence is <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0%7E2016%7EMain%20Features%7EReligion%20Data%20Summary%7E70">declining</a> in Australia, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the end of religious influence in politics. </p>
<p>In her book <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691164755/nations-under-god">Nations Under God</a>, Anna Grzymala-Busse shows religious groups can continue to shape policy even in countries where people are averse to their involvement in politics. They can do this when they are seen as being “above politics”. Religious figures are powerful when they appear to be giving non-partisan guidance to political figures, legitimised by a strong relationship between church and nation.</p>
<p>Australia’s history has not created the kind of fusion between Christianity and nationalism that we see in places like Poland or the United States. But during the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10361140601158526">prime ministership of John Howard</a>, politicians <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10361140902862784">increasingly blended Christianity</a> into a <a href="https://www.monash.edu/arts/philosophical-historical-international-studies/eras/past-editions/edition-seven-2005-november/god-under-howard-the-rise-of-the-religious-right-in-australian-politics-by-marion-maddox">conservative vision of the Australian nation</a>. This in turn created a favourable environment for religious influence.</p>
<p>In a 2014 article, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/1462317X13Z.00000000071">Marion Maddox</a> described the success of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) in Canberra. Howard brought the ACL to prominence by treating it as a “legitimate peak body” for Christianity. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414459/original/file-20210804-24-y7bh9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414459/original/file-20210804-24-y7bh9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414459/original/file-20210804-24-y7bh9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414459/original/file-20210804-24-y7bh9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414459/original/file-20210804-24-y7bh9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414459/original/file-20210804-24-y7bh9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414459/original/file-20210804-24-y7bh9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Despite having a devoutly Christian prime minister, the role of the Christian right in Australia has waned in recent years.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mick Tsikas/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The ACL’s political access continued under Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/religion/it-seems-the-real-julia-cant-ignore-the-christian-lobby/10102190">Julia Gillard</a>.
At a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-08-10/howard-rudd-woo-christians-online/636110">2007 ACL conference</a>, Rudd and Howard both spoke, with Rudd describing how his Christian beliefs gave him a unifying vision for the nation. </p>
<p>Gillard, raised Baptist but a self-described atheist, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/review-missed-opportunity-to-separate-church-and-state-20130117-2cuoc.html">held private meetings</a> on anti-discrimination laws with ACL leader Jim Wallace. In a 2011 interview, Gillard <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-03-22/social_conservative_julia3a_which_is_the_real_one_now3f/45392">described herself</a> as a “cultural traditionalist” who believed it was important for people to understand the Bible because “the Bible has formed such an important part of our culture”. As prime minister, Gillard <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-21/rudd27s-gay-marriage-decison-puts-him-at-odds-with-gillard/4702928">opposed</a> same-sex marriage. </p>
<p>Maddox warned that Australians had failed to recognise the “extremist” right-wing nature of the ACL. It successfully presented itself as “middle of the road” politically, theologically and culturally. In reality, it represented a small, ultraconservative slice of mostly neo-Pentecostal Christianity.</p>
<p>Even at the peak of the Christian right’s power, political scientists noted its <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2013/s3765154.htm">electoral</a> and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10361146.2011.595387">policy</a> <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10361140903296545">limitations</a>. Abbott’s 2013 election victory didn’t help it. His ascendancy hardened “<a href="https://ipa.org.au/ipa-review-articles/tony-abbotts-culture-challenge">culture war</a>” divisions, limiting the influence of Christian conservatives to <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-christian-lobby-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-religious-right-60624">the Coalition side of politics</a>. Labor <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6076831/bill-shorten-tells-christian-lobby-he-supports-same-sex-marriage/">stopped courting</a> conservative Christian votes, despite having <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/15/dastyari-high-number-of-no-votes-in-labor-seats-shows-huge-disconnect">conservative Christian voters</a>. </p>
<p>The Coalition could form electoral majorities, but was itself <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f793f132-96f8-11e7-b83c-9588e51488a0">divided</a> on the big “<a href="https://australianelectionstudy.org/wp-content/uploads/Sheppard-Moral-politics-2016-AQSPS.pdf">moral</a>” issues where conservatives are in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/same-sex-marriage-results-crush-the-idea-that-australian-voters-crave-conservatism-87316">minority</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/same-sex-marriage-results-crush-the-idea-that-australian-voters-crave-conservatism-87316">Same-sex marriage results crush the idea that Australian voters crave conservatism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>From ‘Christian nation’ to ‘religious freedom’</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/11/australians-are-very-skeptical-michael-kirby-warns-against-excessive-protection-of-religious-freedoms">Critics of religious influence</a> see ominous signs in the Morrison government’s <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/right-wing-backlash-church-group-to-make-religious-freedom-an-election-issue-20210602-p57xce.html">push</a> for a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-31/religious-freedom-draft-bill-may-prove-morrisons-toughest-test/11466242">religious freedom bill</a>. They warn such legislation will carve out spaces for <a href="https://theconversation.com/governments-religious-discrimination-bill-enshrines-the-right-to-harm-others-in-the-name-of-faith-131206">religious groups to discriminate</a>. But the shift to a religious freedom agenda also marks a retreat of religious power in Australian life.</p>
<p>As Carol Johnson and Marion Maddox <a href="https://theconversation.com/talk-of-same-sex-marriage-impinging-on-religious-freedom-is-misconceived-heres-why-82435">point out</a>, Australia’s biggest churches used to oppose efforts to expand religious freedom. They did so from a position of majority dominance, worried that efforts to protect minorities could lead to stricter separation of church and state. </p>
<p>In 2008, the Human Rights Commission conducted the Freedom of Religion and Belief in Australia Inquiry. An <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.1839-4655.2012.tb00250.x">analysis</a> found 40% of public submissions included the “assertion that Australia is a Christian nation”. That assertion is much rarer today.</p>
<p>Even large churches are now conscious of being in a national minority on issues like marriage and sexuality. In 2017 the Turnbull government announced a <a href="https://pmc.gov.au/domestic-policy/religious-freedom-review">Religious Freedom Review</a> in response to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-13/religious-freedom-debate-does-little-to-help-malcolm-turnbulll/9989314">conservative worries</a> about the <a href="https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/marriage/pages/1839/attachments/original/1505496213/Consequences-_Changing_the_Law_on_Marriage_Affects_Everyone.pdf?1505496213">implications of changing marriage laws</a>. In my analysis of the 15,500 <a href="https://www.pmc.gov.au/domestic-policy/religious-freedom-review/review-submissions">public submissions</a> to the review, I found just four assertions that Australia is a Christian nation or country.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414457/original/file-20210804-22-1lowfoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414457/original/file-20210804-22-1lowfoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414457/original/file-20210804-22-1lowfoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414457/original/file-20210804-22-1lowfoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414457/original/file-20210804-22-1lowfoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414457/original/file-20210804-22-1lowfoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414457/original/file-20210804-22-1lowfoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former prime minister Tony Abbott has referred to Australian society as ‘relentlessly secular’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joel Carrett/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The term “Christian nation” was used 101 unique times across print media (in reference to Australia) from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2020. It appears to be in decline as a term. It appeared 35 times in 2016, 34 times in 2017 (the year of the same-sex marriage referendum), 16 times in 2018, 7 times in 2019 and 8 times in 2020. Furthermore, nearly half the times it was mentioned, it was by someone refuting the claim that Australia is a Christian nation.</p>
<p>When Australians do refer to their country as “Christian”, they are usually talking about heritage, rituals, holidays and census numbers. These may involve <a href="http://pcs.mcmasterdivinity.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/4.PCS_.25-74-Goroncy.pdf">implied racial boundaries</a>. </p>
<p>But Australians generally lack the classic ingredients of true religious nationalism: a sense of being “<a href="https://networks.h-net.org/node/10670/reviews/11100/hexham-smith-chosen-peoples-sacred-sources-national-identity">chosen</a>” by God or of a <a href="https://tif.ssrc.org/2010/01/08/a-neo-weberian-theory-of-american-civil-religion/">sacred covenant</a> between God and the nation. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-religion-rises-and-falls-in-modern-australia-74367">How religion rises – and falls – in modern Australia</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Many of Australia’s devoutly Christian politicians <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/left-behind-progressive-australians-reluctance-to-talk-religion-20170616-gwsmv6.html">don’t like</a> calling Australia a Christian nation. Indeed, Abbott once described Australia as “<a href="https://www.cathnews.com/archives/cath-news-archive/11098-pope-to-be-seen-but-not-heard-abbott">relentlessly secular</a>”. I can find no record of Morrison publicly calling Australia a Christian nation or country. The last prime minister to do so was Malcolm Turnbull, who <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/opinion/welcome-mr-netanyahu-the-first-israeli-pm-to-visit-australia/news-story/047d61e185967150349c6f93cc1831eb">described</a> Australia as a “majority Christian nation” sharing a biblical heritage with Israel. </p>
<p>The debate around religious freedom reflects a new concept of religious traditionalists as minorities requiring protection. It also reframes religious alliances in terms of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-social-conservatism-among-ethnic-communities-drove-a-strong-no-vote-in-western-sydney-87509">multiculturalism</a> and <a href="https://freedomforfaith.org.au/articles/ruddock-review-submission-protecting-diversity/">diversity</a>. </p>
<p>Conservative religious actors will fight to protect their existing <a href="https://www.alrc.gov.au/inquiry/review-into-the-framework-of-religious-exemptions-in-anti-discrimination-legislation/">privileges</a> and will try to carve out <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/liberal-mps-want-folau-s-law-removed-from-religious-discrimination-bill-20210722-p58c25.html">new ones</a>. But they are no longer in a position to bring Australian society into line with their beliefs.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165169/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Those on the Christian right in Australia once wielded considerable clout, but they are no longer in a position to bring the majority of Australians in line with their views.David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1591952021-04-17T03:08:31Z2021-04-17T03:08:31ZRemembering Andrew Peacock, a Liberal leader of intelligence, wit and charm<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/395551/original/file-20210417-13-1mas47d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Paul Miller</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Andrew Sharp Peacock, for so long “the coming man” of Australian politics, has died in the United States aged 82.</p>
<p>Born in 1939, he was educated at Scotch College, Melbourne, acquired a law degree at the University of Melbourne, where he also met his first wife, Susan Rossiter, the daughter of Victorian Liberal politician Sir John Rossiter.</p>
<p>By the age of 26 he had been president of the Victorian Young Liberals and became president of the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party at a time when Victoria was the Liberals’ “jewel in the crown”.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1383039376058318859"}"></div></p>
<p>Liberal warhorses, of whom <a href="https://biography.senate.gov.au/cormack-magnus-cameron/">Senator Magnus Cormack</a> was one, saw Peacock as the future of the Liberal Party. Peacock also gained an impeccable contact with the past when, in 1966, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/andrew-peacock-dies-in-the-united-states-aged-82-20210416-p57jze.html">he succeeded Sir Robert Menzies</a> in the seat of Kooyong.</p>
<p>He immediately attracted attention when he arrived in Canberra, where in the Liberal Party Room he experienced the resentment of the envious and of the by-passed.</p>
<p>There was a minor setback when John Gorton in 1968 brought another Victorian, <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lynch-sir-phillip-reginald-14391">Phillip Lynch</a>, into the ministry, overlooking Peacock who believed Gorton had promised him a promotion. Perhaps surprisingly, 35 years later Peacock was still expressing hurt at being overlooked.</p>
<p>In the parliamentary party, he joined the so-called <a href="https://www.moadoph.gov.au/blog/divisive-agents-of-the-prime-minister-or-an-innocent-supper-club/#">Mushroom Club</a> with other good friends like Jim Killen, Tom Hughes and Don Chipp, all of whom were expected to advance, and did so.</p>
<p>Gorton promoted Peacock after almost losing the supposedly the unlosable <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Australian_federal_election">election of 1969</a>. As minister for the army, Peacock found it difficult working under Defence Minister Malcolm Fraser, and would again feel a lasting pain when “Bill” McMahon, with Fraser’s help, <a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/australias-prime-ministers/william-mcmahon/during-office">displaced Gorton in March 1971</a>.</p>
<p>Peacock survived a McMahon cull of Gorton supporters, performed well as minister for external territories, and stayed on the front bench after Gough Whitlam won the 1972 election.</p>
<p>The “coming man” appeared closer to arrival when Fraser appointed Peacock foreign minister in 1975, a move that benefited Fraser by keeping a potential challenger out of the country.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/vale-bob-hawke-a-giant-of-australian-political-and-industrial-history-93719">Vale Bob Hawke, a giant of Australian political and industrial history</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The job meant Peacock could do what he always did so well: meeting and greeting the high-ranking and influential from around the world. His natural charm, good looks and genuine goodwill, combined with a sympathy for people and an understanding of different countries’ situations, enabled him to work with and alongside Asians and Africans, Europeans, Americans and Pacific Islanders.</p>
<p>Cormack wanted his “pupil” to challenge Fraser for the leadership. Peacock flopped badly when, having previously moved to the seemingly unsuitable portfolio of industrial relations, he did try for the leadership in 1982.</p>
<p>At least he was well placed to succeed Fraser after the Coalition lost the 1983 election to Bob Hawke’s Labor Party. Peacock proceeded to lose two of his own – in 1984 and 1990 – while doing better than expected in adverse circumstances in opposing Hawke.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NXQ5hAJodMQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Critically, however, Peacock exposed a weakness that offset the advantages of intelligence, charm, and apparent self-possession. Beyond proclaiming the shibboleths, it was never clear just what he believed in and what he stood for.</p>
<p>During Peacock’s supposed rivalry with Howard – beneath the surface it was really one between their supporters – one senior moderate Liberal explained his own dilemma:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>do I vote for Howard, whose views I dislike, or for Peacock, whose views remain a mystery?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A former federal president from the 1980s once described Peacock as a man who would denounce you in a “vile” manner and then walk through a door, see you, smile broadly and greet you warmly.</p>
<p>After losing in 1990, Peacock drifted towards the exit door of politics and looked more at ease as the Howard-appointed Ambassador to the United States. At the end of his tenure in 2000 he took various positions in business in America and Australia.</p>
<p>So, why did the “coming man” never arrive at the Lodge? Commentators usually scoffed at Peacock’s own explanation that he was never sure he really wanted the top job.</p>
<p>Yet, looking at how he went about his early career in the Liberal Party, where he was striving to advance himself and was not in a mood to accept setbacks, he was not the same man who reached for the party leadership three times in the 1980s.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Peacock with John Howard in 2000.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Unlike Peacock, Fraser and Howard went for the leadership with agendas. They stood, most of the time, for identifiable and consistent positions and they were there for the long haul.</p>
<p>Peacock was probably at his best when he left that world behind him.</p>
<p>He married happily the third time, and through Penne Percy Korth gravitated to a world occupied by the more moderate Republicans. He also had a close relationship with his three daughters.</p>
<p>Beyond appearances, Peacock had the endearing quality of generating a natural warmth, charm and wit.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/159195/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Hancock does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For so long the ‘coming man’ of Australian political life, Peacock’s many natural gifts always seemed better used beyond politics than within it.Ian Hancock, School visitor, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1515762020-12-31T20:19:58Z2020-12-31T20:19:58ZCabinet papers 2000: the Coalition before climate denialism, but on the path to offshore detention<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376059/original/file-20201220-15-jsysuy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> </figcaption></figure><p>Australian Cabinet papers from 2000, released today, reflect a relatively quiescent Australia where Islamic militancy and offshore detention were barely glimpses on the horizon, and climate science denialism was not a factor in cabinet considerations at all. </p>
<p>It was the year before the “<a href="https://insidestory.org.au/the-year-of-living-anxiously/">year that changed everything</a>”: 2001, when <a href="https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/defining-images-from-the-9-11-attacks-idUSRTS2Q0UX">Al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11</a>, and the Howard government created its “<a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/pubs/bn/2012-2013/pacificsolution">Pacific Solution</a>” asylum-seeker deterrent. They would both become prisms through which Australian politics would be refracted for many years to come.</p>
<p>In contrast, in 2000, <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=ZD4">John Howard</a> (prime minister 1996-2007) later mused, “we had no conception of the challenges which would engulf the world in the next few years”.</p>
<p>The government’s concerns half-way through its second term, with a 14-seat majority, were overwhelmingly domestic. The approach to global issues mostly prioritised local implications over international obligations. </p>
<h2>Minchin throws a stick in the wheel of an ETS</h2>
<p>On climate change, the papers reveal a working consensus among cabinet ministers, with one exception, that an emissions trading scheme (ETS) was not only a possible but a likely route by which Australia would eventually fulfil its international environmental obligations.</p>
<p>The market-based nature and sectoral neutrality of an ETS made it the quality choice, cabinet submissions and departmental co-ordination comments make clear. The papers show early work being done on an ETS within the government. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376060/original/file-20201220-15-1u1fz3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376060/original/file-20201220-15-1u1fz3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376060/original/file-20201220-15-1u1fz3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376060/original/file-20201220-15-1u1fz3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376060/original/file-20201220-15-1u1fz3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376060/original/file-20201220-15-1u1fz3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376060/original/file-20201220-15-1u1fz3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Senator Nick Minchin stood alone in his objection to an ETS to tackle climate change.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alan Porritt/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Industry and Resources Minister Nick Minchin stood out against the ETS consensus. Advocating a massive expansion of the gas industry, Minchin pushed for compensation for carbon-intensive industries so large and across so many sectors that it would have massively blunted an ETS’s impact. This drew sharp adverse comments from across the key departments. </p>
<p>Treasurer Peter Costello and his department supported expansion of the gas industry, but drew the line at Minchin’s proposed emasculation of a future ETS. Costello would unsuccessfully bring an ETS proposal to cabinet three years later, in 2003. Howard announced one in the lead-up the 2007 election. </p>
<p>So the 2000 papers contain foundational documents at the heart of this policy arc. They show Minchin as central in swerving cabinet from its consensus ETS support in 2000, to hostility by the time he helped install Tony Abbott as Liberal opposition leader in 2009.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bushfires-wont-change-climate-policy-overnight-but-morrison-can-shift-the-coalition-without-losing-face-129354">Bushfires won't change climate policy overnight. But Morrison can shift the Coalition without losing face</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The GST takes flight</h2>
<p>Costello’s implementation of the <a href="https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-03/Whitepaper.pdf">goods and services tax (GST)</a> was the centre of heavy cabinet deliberations ahead of its implementation on July 1 2000.</p>
<p>It was the culmination of a textbook exercise in conceiving, publicly advocating for and then successfully implementing a major, complex public policy – an object lesson for governments today. </p>
<p>It begs the question whether, had the Coalition won the 2007 election, an ETS might now be an unremarked-upon aspect of public finance in Australia too, just like the once controversial GST.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S-DrA4gnuFA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Rural and regional Australia was a major focus, with cabinet submissions generally including rural impact statements. </p>
<p>Howard benefited from a congenial relationship with the National Party leader and deputy prime minister, <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=4K4">John Anderson</a>. </p>
<p>Anderson was the best-educated Nationals leader since <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/page-sir-earle-christmas-7941">Earle Page</a>. He was aligned with the National Farmers Federation (NFF) push for market-oriented policy over the old Country Party “deal-making” policy style, to which the Nationals later reverted. </p>
<p>Howard could count on Anderson’s support in cabinet. In exchange, Anderson ran a massive infrastructure program bringing concrete benefits to the bush and regions and kept its voters welded to the Coalition.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376061/original/file-20201220-13-n7xg18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376061/original/file-20201220-13-n7xg18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376061/original/file-20201220-13-n7xg18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376061/original/file-20201220-13-n7xg18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376061/original/file-20201220-13-n7xg18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376061/original/file-20201220-13-n7xg18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376061/original/file-20201220-13-n7xg18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Howard had a strong relationship with Nationals leader John Anderson (right), which offered advantages to both men.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cabinet-papers-1998-99-how-the-gst-became-unstoppable-128844">Cabinet papers 1998-99: how the GST became unstoppable</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>On many issues, little has changed in 20 years</h2>
<p>Women are barely mentioned in the papers and were almost non-existent in Howard government decision-making. There was only one woman in the 17 strong cabinet: the family and community services minister, <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=BE4">Senator Jocelyn Newman</a>. </p>
<p>In the outer ministry, the aged care minister, <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=SE4">Bronwyn Bishop</a>, came under pressure when it emerged <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/kerosene-bath-nurses-banned-20020329-gdu35d.html">residents at Riverside Home in Melbourne were being subjected to kerosene baths</a>, with lethal consequences. Problems in other aged care homes quickly emerged.</p>
<p>Bishop’s cabinet submission in the wake of the crisis trumpeted the government’s Aged Care Act 1997 as “the basis for a sound and sustainable aged care system” and “the most significant change for the industry in its history”.</p>
<p>There was no need to restore nursing ratios, she argued. A “return to ratios would return the industry to detailed input regulation and reduce its efficiency” the submission, which cabinet backed, said.</p>
<p>Indigenous Australians are little mentioned other than in relation to workforce disadvantage and the Northern Territory’s move to mandatory detention for minors.</p>
<p>Cabinet supported only a fraction of the assistance requested by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs Minister <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=VW4">John Herron</a> to address deep and worsening Indigenous unemployment.</p>
<p>The government decided not to override the NT government’s mandatory detention move. Instead, it asked Attorney-General <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=7V5">Daryl Williams</a> to write to his NT counterpart about its concerns. A week later, cabinet was outraged when it found a United Nations committee investigating potential human rights breaches in Australia against Indigenous citizens, without consultation.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376063/original/file-20201220-13-o4dtrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376063/original/file-20201220-13-o4dtrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376063/original/file-20201220-13-o4dtrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376063/original/file-20201220-13-o4dtrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376063/original/file-20201220-13-o4dtrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376063/original/file-20201220-13-o4dtrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376063/original/file-20201220-13-o4dtrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Indigenous Australians receive little mention in the 2000 cabinet papers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Marianna Massey</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What the 2000 cabinet papers reveal concerning the growing issue of unauthorised boat arrivals in Australia, and in particular the “deterrent” approach Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Minister <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=0J4">Philip Ruddock</a> recommended, and cabinet adopted, is historically significant. </p>
<p>They show a government under increasing pressure and moving quickly down a particular path. Departmental comments show this rang increasingly loud alarm bells in the major departments, even as they broadly supported the “deterrent” approach. </p>
<p>There are, and likely always will be, different opinions about the deterrent strategy, and public discussion usually turns on the binary question of whether it was right or wrong.</p>
<p>The 2000 papers are important, not least because they open up critical additional questions, even for its supporters, about whether this strategy could have been implemented differently and better.</p>
<p>Anglosphere politics had begun to make a particular kind of shift to the right, and the Howard government was in the vanguard. It was still relatively early days in that shift, as the fact the government had a cabinet position that included “multicultural affairs” in its title attests.</p>
<p>To put this shift into international context, media mogul Rupert Murdoch would not appoint Roger Ailes CEO of his Fox News channel in the United States until the following year.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376062/original/file-20201220-57963-z5xrgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376062/original/file-20201220-57963-z5xrgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376062/original/file-20201220-57963-z5xrgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376062/original/file-20201220-57963-z5xrgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376062/original/file-20201220-57963-z5xrgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1280&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376062/original/file-20201220-57963-z5xrgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1280&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376062/original/file-20201220-57963-z5xrgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1280&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pauline Hanson’s arrival in Canberra in 1996 marked a shift to explicitly nativist politics in Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Australia’s insurgency of explicitly nativist politics was marked by the arrival in Canberra in 1996 of One Nation’s <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=BK6">Pauline Hanson</a> as the member for Oxley. Internationally, this wave may have peaked in the election of another nativist redhead, US President Donald Trump, 20 years later. </p>
<p>The fierce conduct of the “<a href="https://www.evatt.org.au/post/the-history-wars">history wars</a>” in Australia from the 1990s, the prominent role of <a href="https://theconversation.com/with-friends-like-these-just-how-close-are-the-liberal-party-and-ipa-60442">conservative think tanks</a> in it, and the early challenge and ongoing political consequences of unauthorised boat arrivals in Australia – which has only relatively recently emerged as an issue in Europe – make Australia an early example of a phenomenon that shifted mainstream conservative politics to a distinctly different place from that occupied before.</p>
<p>In 2000, elements of it were evident but not yet fully activated. The following year, from September 11, they would be supercharged.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/pauline-hanson-built-a-political-career-on-white-victimhood-and-brought-far-right-rhetoric-to-the-mainstream-134661">Pauline Hanson built a political career on white victimhood and brought far-right rhetoric to the mainstream</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Chris Wallace is the official historian for the 2000-2001 cabinet papers release from the National Archives of Australia. You can read her full essay on the 2000 papers <a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/cabinet/latest-cabinet-release">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151576/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Wallace has received funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>In the Howard government, there was near-consensus in Cabinet that an ETS was eventually likely. A spike in asylum-seeker arrivals stimulated the hard “deterrent’ strategy” that would morph into the “Pacific Solution” in 2001.Chris Wallace, Associate Professor, 50/50 By 2030 Foundation, Faculty of Business Government & Law, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1510172020-11-30T01:43:10Z2020-11-30T01:43:10ZWhat Australia can learn from New Zealand: a new perspective on that tricky trans-Tasman relationship<p>The recurring metaphor of New Zealand as “experiment” or “<a href="https://teara.govt.nz/en/visitors-opinions-about-new-zealand/page-3">social laboratory</a>” might go back to the 1890s, but it continues to resonate in the 21st century. </p>
<p>Australian political journalist <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/laura-tingle/9711054?nw=0">Laura Tingle</a> has revived the venerable idea in the latest edition of the <a href="https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/">Quarterly Essay</a>, The High Road: What Australia can learn from New Zealand.</p>
<p>Her comparative historical narrative reveals uncanny parallels between the two countries — and significant divergences — with special attention to the recent history of neoliberal reforms, beginning in the 1980s, and then through to the post-global financial crisis and COVID-19 eras. </p>
<p>Time and perspective make all the difference, of course.</p>
<p>In the 1990s, for instance, when New Zealand was the global poster child for neoliberalism, Australia’s business lobbyists might have asked: why don’t we adopt the New Zealand model? Nowadays, the Australian left might <a href="https://theconversation.com/left-leaning-australians-may-look-to-new-zealand-with-envy-but-ardern-still-has-much-work-to-do-128227">look wistfully across the Tasman</a> and ask a similar question — for radically different reasons.</p>
<p>What Australians think they can learn from New Zealand, then, depends on the interests and values they stand for — and on the spin they put into retelling the histories of both countries.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371850/original/file-20201129-19-d3qzbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371850/original/file-20201129-19-d3qzbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371850/original/file-20201129-19-d3qzbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371850/original/file-20201129-19-d3qzbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371850/original/file-20201129-19-d3qzbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1057&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371850/original/file-20201129-19-d3qzbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1057&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371850/original/file-20201129-19-d3qzbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1057&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Good and bad lessons</h2>
<p>Although long, Tingle’s essay could hardly do justice to the sweep of history it covers. It’s a commendable effort all the same, with only a few inaccuracies. For example, she writes “there wasn’t any official British administrative presence in New Zealand […] until 1839”, overlooking the arrival of James Busby in 1833 as <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/james-busby-inaugurated-british-resident">first British Resident</a>.</p>
<p>But overall, Tingle’s trans-Tasman comparative political economy hits the right spots.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/with-a-mandate-to-govern-new-zealand-alone-labour-must-now-decide-what-it-really-stands-for-144490">With a mandate to govern New Zealand alone, Labour must now decide what it really stands for</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>She argues: “[T]he extent and speed of change in New Zealand [in the late 1980s and early 1990s], and the havoc it wreaked, would be impossible to defend from an Australian perspective.” </p>
<p>And, indeed, New Zealand’s “radical industrial relations change [from 1991] has not provided any panacea” for its persistently low levels of productivity — nor for a widening income gap with Australia.</p>
<p>In contrast, New Zealand’s <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/treaty/the-treaty-in-brief">Treaty of Waitangi</a> (1840) recognises Indigenous rights and provides constitutional backing for reconciliation and reparations. Its relevance has only grown, putting New Zealand well ahead of Australia in this respect, albeit with much work still to do.</p>
<h2>Growing apart</h2>
<p>At the turn of the 20th century, New Zealanders politely declined to join Australians in federation. The invitation is still open, in principle, but unlikely ever to be taken up. Neither side has any interest in completing that job. </p>
<p>As both countries matured after the world wars, they tended to ignore one another, looking more to the UK, Europe and US as leaders and exemplars. This is despite the Closer Economic Relations <a href="https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/free-trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements-in-force/nz-australia-closer-economic-relations-cer/">CER</a> agreement (1983) and the many parallels in their political histories that Tingle points out.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/courageous-investment-means-innovation-stays-in-nz-not-sold-off-overseas-150381">'Courageous' investment means innovation stays in NZ, not sold off overseas</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Regrettably, the two countries have continued to grow apart. The post-1984 <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/nuclear-free-nz">nuclear-free policy</a> led to New Zealand being kicked out of the <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/anzus-comes-into-force">ANZUS</a> Treaty. Then, as immigration and security became serious issues, the then Australian prime minister, John Howard, unilaterally withdrew the (once reciprocal) social rights of <a href="https://theconversation.com/wheres-the-choice-bro-kiwis-in-australia-get-a-raw-deal-18545">Kiwis in Australia</a> (an event Tingle omits to mention).</p>
<p>There was an accusation that New Zealanders were bludging off Australians in terms of both incomes and regional defence. Nowadays Australia deports its unwanted Kiwis with alacrity, which Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pointedly described as “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/28/not-much-love-actually-jacinda-ardern-was-right-to-call-out-australias-corrosive-policies">corrosive to our relationship</a>”. </p>
<h2>Trust in government</h2>
<p>Given that diplomatic corrosion, Australia probably won’t learn much from New Zealand. Nevertheless, the shared trauma of a global pandemic could bring the two countries closer again, especially once travel restrictions ease.</p>
<p>Many Australians see the conduct of politics in New Zealand as more civil and mature. Ardern certainly burnishes that reputation, even though there is scepticism at home about her government’s actual performance.</p>
<p>Tingle rightly points out that New Zealand’s proportional representation <a href="https://www.parliament.nz/en/get-involved/features/what-is-the-mmp-voting-system/">electoral system</a> encourages competition for that notional median voter. Hence there is convergence between major political parties, rather than polarisation. Kiwi politicians never know when they might need their opponents’ support. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/who-are-donald-trumps-supporters-in-new-zealand-and-what-do-we-know-about-them-149424">Who are Donald Trump’s supporters in New Zealand and what do we know about them?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Perhaps related to this, international comparative data indicate that people’s “<a href="https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/publications/global-satisfaction-democracy-report-2020/">dissatisfaction with democracy</a>” has grown alarmingly in Australia, the UK and the US — but not in New Zealand.</p>
<h2>Keeping dialogue open</h2>
<p>Being a small unitary state with a unicameral legislature, change is institutionally easier and swifter in Wellington than in Canberra. Because of this, New Zealand occasionally does something that makes Australians stop and think. </p>
<p>For instance, Australia was once on the verge of adopting New Zealand’s <a href="http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n5314/pdf/ch14.pdf">universal no-fault model</a> of accident compensation. That fell through with the dismissal of the Whitlam government. But Australia’s federal constitution would have made implementation more complicated. </p>
<p>Whether New Zealand is ever an example worth following is up to your political judgment. But Tingle’s essay is an important contribution to a maturing cross-Tasman dialogue that looks far beyond ANZAC jingoism and sporting rivalries. </p>
<p>Still, both countries are divided over how to understand their own histories, let alone learn one another’s. And there will always be argument about whether and why Australia could learn anything at all from New Zealand, or vice versa. </p>
<p>Tingle suggests paying closer attention to New Zealand — in the sense of it still being an experiment or a laboratory — and that seems to be all.</p>
<p>If the Australian government were to reconsider its “corrosive” approach to the relationship, however, we might begin to see a more constructive sharing of ideas in both directions.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151017/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Grant Duncan is a citizen of both Australia and New Zealand.</span></em></p>In a major essay, senior Australian political correspondent Laura Tingle suggests her country could still learn from the New Zealand ‘experiment’.Grant Duncan, Associate Professor, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1423992020-07-09T10:11:20Z2020-07-09T10:11:20ZPolitics with Michelle Grattan: Christopher Pyne on being ‘the ultimate insider’<p>Former Liberal Minister Christopher Pyne attracted critics for his political front. But he always had plenty of friends and networks, enabling him often to be a player, if not always a “fixer”. </p>
<p>After his election to the South Australian seat of Sturt at age 25, he went on to hold senior portfolios, notably education and defence, and to stride the parliamentary stage as Leader of the House of Representatives.</p>
<p>In his memoir, The Insider, the former politician provides his take, humorous and candid, on a tumultuous 26 parliamentary years.</p>
<p>In this podcast, Pyne talks about life after politics, and stories from the ‘Canberra bubble’.</p>
<p>“I don’t miss politics at all - because I left happy, and I wanted to go. </p>
<p>"So I’m not one of these politicians that was dragged kicking and screaming. I left when people wanted me to stay, which is a great rarity.”</p>
<p>Pyne is ultra candid about his ambition to be prime minister:</p>
<p>“I think when you’re 15, and you decided you want to be a member of the House of Representatives, you kind of think ‘I’m going to dream big.’ So of course I dreamt to be prime minister”.</p>
<p>Reality, it appears, didn’t hit for quite a while. </p>
<p>“I think that week when Malcolm [Turnbull] was deposed and nobody was suggesting that I should be running for leader, it dawned on me that the generation that was being elected, which was Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg, were a generation different to me.”</p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/politics-with-michelle-grattan/id703425900?mt=2"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233721/original/file-20180827-75984-1gfuvlr.png" alt="Listen on Apple Podcasts" width="268" height="68"></a> <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly90aGVjb252ZXJzYXRpb24uY29tL2F1L3BvZGNhc3RzL3BvbGl0aWNzLXdpdGgtbWljaGVsbGUtZ3JhdHRhbi5yc3M"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233720/original/file-20180827-75978-3mdxcf.png" alt="" width="268" height="68"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-conversation-4/politics-with-michelle-grattan"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233716/original/file-20180827-75981-pdp50i.png" alt="Stitcher" width="300" height="88"></a> <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/News--Politics-Podcasts/Politics-with-Michelle-Grattan-p227852/"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233723/original/file-20180827-75984-f0y2gb.png" alt="Listen on TuneIn" width="318" height="125"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://radiopublic.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-WRElBZ"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-152" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233717/original/file-20180827-75990-86y5tg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=268&fit=clip" alt="Listen on RadioPublic" width="268" height="87"></a> <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5NkaSQoUERalaLBQAqUOcC"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237984/original/file-20180925-149976-1ks72uy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=268&fit=clip" width="268" height="82"></a> </p>
<h2>Additional audio</h2>
<p><a href="http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/The_Big_Loop_-_FML_original_podcast_score/Lee_Rosevere_-_The_Big_Loop_-_FML_original_podcast_score_-_10_A_List_of_Ways_to_Die">A List of Ways to Die</a>, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142399/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Michelle Grattan discusses politics, and life after politics, with Christopher Pyne.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.