tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/monash-university-2850/articlesMonash University – The Conversation2021-08-01T20:10:55Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1653022021-08-01T20:10:55Z2021-08-01T20:10:55ZWho were Australia’s best prime ministers? We asked the experts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/413700/original/file-20210729-15-z6idkb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=83%2C5%2C3808%2C1988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public Domain except Hawke, Keating and Howard (Commonwealth of Australia CC-BY-SA)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Who have been Australia’s most accomplished prime ministers? Curiously, it’s a question that is seldom asked. We enthusiastically compile lists of the greatest films or sporting champions, but rarely do we apply the same energy to thinking about prime-ministerial virtuosity.</p>
<p>More common is the rush to condemn incumbents. For example, a recent venomous <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/07/22/have-we-ever-been-led-by-a-worse-prime-minister-than-this-smirking-vacuum/">piece of commentary</a> on Scott Morrison demanded to know: “Have we ever been led by a worse prime minister than this smirking vacuum?” </p>
<p>The problem with these hyperbolic attacks is that they lack context. How does Morrison’s leadership compare to his 29 predecessors? And, in any case, is it too early to properly judge his performance given his prime-ministerial project is incomplete?</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/lacking-a-script-individuals-drove-the-evolution-of-prime-ministerial-power-53741">Lacking a script, individuals drove the evolution of prime ministerial power</a>
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<h2>What makes a great prime minister?</h2>
<p>Evaluating leadership performance is replete with difficulties. This is despite the fact that, in democratic systems like ours, the mark of leadership achievement can appear deceptively simple. </p>
<p>On first consideration, longevity of office appeals as the <em>sine qua non</em> of successful political leadership. After all, winning government is the chief prize for a political leader, and retaining power, which is indicative of holding onto public support, affords the primary means by which to exercise influence. </p>
<p>Yet further reflection suggests survival alone is not a sufficient criterion of leadership success: it must also take account of what is accomplished with power. Indeed, should the legacy of a leader’s time in office be the paramount test of performance? </p>
<p>But then a new problem: how are we to construct meaningful and agreed upon measurements of the scale and quality of that legacy? Surely, for instance, the benchmark has to be more than the legislative productivity of a leader’s government. Yet once we endeavour to devise qualitative measurements that factor in the impact of the changes a leader has wrought, we inevitably run into disagreements about whether those changes were for good or bad.</p>
<p>One way of sidestepping the difficulties of evaluating political leadership is expert rankings. That is, ranking evaluations gained from people with professional knowledge, rather than surveys based on population sampling. </p>
<p>These have a storied history in the United States. Presidential rankings are not only conducted regularly but their results painstakingly analysed and hotly debated. </p>
<p>In parliamentary democracies such as Australia, leadership rankings have taken longer to catch on. But they have gained a foothold in recent decades. Most of them have been ad hoc surveys of a small number of public intellectuals and commentators initiated by broadsheet newspapers. </p>
<p>In 2010 and again in 2020, however, large-scale expert rankings surveys have been run out of Monash University. Sixty-six political scientists and political historians participated in last year’s survey. They were asked to rate the performance of all prime ministers, barring the incumbent (Morrison was not included as Julia Gillard was not included in the 2010 survey), and the three caretakers, Earle Page, Frank Forde and John McEwen, who briefly warmed the prime-ministerial seat following the death of an incumbent.</p>
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<h2>John Curtin, war-time PM, rated our greatest leader</h2>
<p>The results of the 2010 and 2020 Monash surveys suggest there is a reasonable consensus about who have been our best prime ministers. </p>
<p>The top-rated national leader is Australia’s second world war prime minister and co-architect of its post-war reconstruction regime, John Curtin. Next comes Bob Hawke, whose governments modernised and internationalised Australia’s economy in the 1980s through market-based reforms cushioned by an overlay of social democratic values. </p>
<p>Third-ranked is Alfred Deakin, the Liberal Protectionist prime minister and the chief architect of the nation-building edifice laid down in the first Commonwealth decade. It included, among other things, tariff protection, an industrial arbitration system and the beginnings of a welfare state through provision of old age pensions. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/413863/original/file-20210729-19-1yfipmf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/413863/original/file-20210729-19-1yfipmf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/413863/original/file-20210729-19-1yfipmf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/413863/original/file-20210729-19-1yfipmf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/413863/original/file-20210729-19-1yfipmf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/413863/original/file-20210729-19-1yfipmf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/413863/original/file-20210729-19-1yfipmf.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">
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<span class="caption">John Curtin (second from left), who led Australia through the second world war and co-designed its post-war reconstruction, has been ranked our best prime minister.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/AP</span></span>
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<p>Ben Chifley, Curtin’s collaborator in the design of the post-war reconstruction Keynesian welfare state, is also in the top echelon. He is followed by Robert Menzies, the father of the modern Liberal Party and Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. </p>
<p>Others who make the top tier or are close to it are: Gough Whitlam, the reforming titan whose government dramatically modernised Australia in the early 1970s; Andrew Fisher, Australia’s first majority prime minister whose legacies included the establishment of the Commonwealth Bank and maternity allowances; and, in a delicious irony, the two great rivals, Paul Keating and John Howard. Keating is the big improver from the 2010 Monash ratings.</p>
<h2>Longevity in office isn’t everything</h2>
<p>The 2020 rankings also asked participants to rate prime ministers in nine performance areas. These were: effectively managing cabinet, maintaining support of party/coalition, demonstrating personal integrity, leaving a significant policy legacy, relationship with the electorate, communication effectiveness, nurturing national unity, defending and promoting Australia’s interests abroad, and being able to manage turbulent times.</p>
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<p>Looking for correlations between performance in these areas and overall ratings it was evident that there was a close nexus between a high ranking and being scored strongly for policy legacy. The upper echelon prime ministers – Curtin, Hawke, Deakin, Chifley, Menzies, Keating, Whitlam, Fisher and Howard – were all in the top grouping for policy legacy. </p>
<p>Julia Gillard rounded out the policy legacy top ten, which seemed to go a long way to explaining her healthy rating in the upper middle tier of the former prime ministers. </p>
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<span class="caption">Julia Gillard was ranked highly for policy significance during her time as prime minister.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lukas Coch/AAP</span></span>
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<p>It appears that in the minds of the participants the relationship with the electorate, while also important, ranks behind policy achievement in significance. Whitlam, Fisher and Keating were all outside the top ten for winning favour with the electorate, but are still highly ranked. </p>
<p>This is further reflected in the fact that, while Australia’s three most durable prime ministers – Menzies, Howard and Hawke – all make or are near the top tier, the next four longest-serving prime ministers and multiple election winners, Malcolm Fraser, Billy Hughes, Joseph Lyons and Stanley Bruce, do not.</p>
<p>In short, though longevity is important, what a prime minister does with office counts more to the experts. Strikingly, all of the top-ranked leaders were either the initiators or consolidators of major policy settlements.</p>
<p>A high score for nurturing national unity also strongly correlates with a favourable overall rating. Howard’s below-average result on that measure seems to disqualify him from pushing further up among the top-ranked prime ministers. </p>
<p>Conversely, the connection was weakest between a high ranking and the integrity performance benchmark. This does not mean the experts paid no heed to integrity. Rather, they had a generally favourable view of the collective integrity of our prime ministers, regarding them as a fundamentally upright bunch.</p>
<h2>And who were the duds?</h2>
<p>What about the prime ministerial dunces? There is not only a consensus about who have been our best prime ministers but also our worst.</p>
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<span class="caption">William ‘Billy’ McMahon was ranked our worst prime minister, but Tony Abbott is hot on his heels.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Museum of Australian Democracy</span></span>
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<p>William McMahon, who was the nation’s leader in the dying days of the Liberal Party’s post-WWII ascendancy and was defeated by Whitlam at the December 1972 election, wins that dubious honour. </p>
<p>Yet the 2020 rankings suggest he now has a rival for that ignominious status: Tony Abbott. Indeed, despite squeaking ahead of McMahon on the overall performance question, Abbott exceeded him for the number of failure ratings: 44 to 41. Against the nine benchmarks, Abbott is ranked last for policy legacy and nurturing national unity. McMahon is bottom for six of the nine areas, among them integrity (part of his entrenched reputation is that of an inveterate schemer and leaker).</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-the-covid-vaccine-rollout-the-greatest-public-policy-failure-in-recent-australian-history-164396">Is the COVID vaccine rollout the greatest public policy failure in recent Australian history?</a>
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<p>Notably, three of the four most recent prime ministers – Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull and Abbott – are situated towards or in the rear of the ratings pack. Together, they occupy the three bottom rungs for management of party/coalition. This suggests respondents hold them, rather than their colleagues, chiefly responsible for their depositions by party-room revolts. </p>
<p>The clear exception among the post-Howard prime ministers is Gillard. Though still only middle-ranked overall, she is by far the highest-rated leader among this ill-starred group.</p>
<p>Where will Morrison end up in the rankings? The short answer is that it is too early to tell since his is an unfinished story. The COVID-19 pandemic has ensured his incumbency will be a significant one, either for good or bad. </p>
<p>Yet the lack of much in the way of tangible policy achievements to this point does not bode well for his rating.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165302/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Strangio 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 a survey sure to provoke debate, 66 political scientists and historians ranked Australia’s second world war prime minister John Curtin as the finest leader we’ve had.Paul Strangio, Professor of Politics, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1471722020-10-01T06:13:12Z2020-10-01T06:13:12ZMonash University plans to cut its musicology subjects. Why does this matter?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360994/original/file-20201001-23-dy08xe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=638%2C73%2C4783%2C3563&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> </figcaption></figure><p>There’s a telling scene in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 screwball comedy <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069495/">What’s Up, Doc?</a> in which a judge asks an academic to tell the court what kind of doctor he is. When he responds “music”, the judge then demands to know whether he can “fix a hi-fi”? The answer is, unsurprisingly, “No”.</p>
<p>The scene works as comedy, one imagines, because few people outside schools of music or humanities departments have much of an idea what a practising doctor of music (or “musicologist”) actually does. </p>
<p>It is no joke, however, when a university the size and stature of Monash contemplates the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/30/australian-universities-to-cut-hundreds-of-courses-as-funding-crisis-deepens">abolition of its musicology and ethnomusicology</a> specialisations.</p>
<p>Monash University’s move, part of a bigger plan to shed jobs due to a loss of revenue, has <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/canon-fodder-monash-cuts-to-music-studies-draw-chorus-of-protest-20200929-p5608q.html">prompted international music academics to express their concern</a>, but should it concern the rest of us? Yes, is the short answer.</p>
<h2>One of the original fields of study</h2>
<p>As it happens, music is one of the original fields of study for a university. It formed part of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium">a group of four</a> of liberal arts subjects (known as a quadrivium) along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.</p>
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<span class="caption">The Lute Player by Caravaggio (1595). Music was once one of the original fields of study for a university.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>This is because, according to Ancient Greek natural philosophy, music had an especially deep connection to the natural world. </p>
<p>It was believed the production of consonant harmonies (combinations of sounds that are agreeable to the ear) involved simple numerical ratios that were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis">mirrored in the motion of the planets</a>. </p>
<p>By the time universities were founded in Australia, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution">Copernican Revolution</a> had long consigned such esoteric speculation to history. Music was reduced to having a much more marginal place in a typical university curriculum, if it appeared at all. Instead, a new institution, the “conservatorium”, arose, focused on elite performance training, not music scholarship. </p>
<p>In 1895, the founder of Melbourne’s first conservatorium, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall-Hall">Professor George W. L. Marshall-Hall</a>, nevertheless recognised that an ideal higher education in music needed to be more than just about producing graduates who could perform to a high standard. </p>
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<span class="caption">Portrait of George Marshall-Hall painted by Tom Roberts in 1900.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>He argued musicians needed also to be able to understand their art form in its broader historical and cultural context. Music graduates should not just be performers, but also historians, analysers, critics, and explorers of the musical culture they inhabited. </p>
<p>This is what the discipline of musicology, broadly conceived, aims to do. </p>
<p>Marshall-Hall’s vision owed more than a little to the ideas of the Prussian scientist and educational reformer, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt">Wilhelm von Humboldt</a> (1767–1835). Humboldt argued the transmission of technical knowledge alone was not a sufficient foundation for a fully rounded higher educational system. </p>
<p>He believed a modern university needed to include the study of the “speculative sciences”: disciplines such as fine art, music, and philosophy. Equally as crucially, all these fields should be advanced through research.</p>
<h2>The rise of ethnomusicology</h2>
<p>Ethnomusicology arose as a separate disciplinary area towards the end of the 19th century. Concerned principally with the study of music in its social context, it is especially (but not exclusively) interested in popular, folk, indigenous, and non-Western musical cultures. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360991/original/file-20201001-23-1r4xvuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360991/original/file-20201001-23-1r4xvuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360991/original/file-20201001-23-1r4xvuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360991/original/file-20201001-23-1r4xvuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360991/original/file-20201001-23-1r4xvuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360991/original/file-20201001-23-1r4xvuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360991/original/file-20201001-23-1r4xvuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360991/original/file-20201001-23-1r4xvuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Percy Grainger (pictured here in 1915) was a pioneer ethnomusicologist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Monash’s <a href="https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/margaret-kartomi">Professor Margaret Kartomi</a> is widely acknowledged as Australia’s leading ethnomusicologist. Her work centres on the diverse music cultures of Australia’s most populous neighbour, Indonesia. </p>
<p>Only last year, Kartomi was awarded the <a href="https://www.amsmusicology.org/news/478000/Margaret-Kartomi-receives-IMS-Guido-Adler-Prize-2019.htm">Guido Adler Prize</a> - a prestigious international prize named after one of the pioneers of modern musicology - for her outstanding contribution to research and teaching in this field. </p>
<p>That her entire scholarly area might now be forced to “shut up shop” should be a matter of considerable concern.</p>
<p>A spokeswoman for Monash <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/30/australian-universities-to-cut-hundreds-of-courses-as-funding-crisis-deepens">said this week</a> the university’s musicology and theatre degree subjects were being closed “due to consistently low unit enrolments”. The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/30/australian-universities-to-cut-hundreds-of-courses-as-funding-crisis-deepens">staffing union, however, disputes this</a>, saying musicology had healthy enrolments. </p>
<p>Whatever the truth of the matter, we know the impact of COVID-19 on Australian university finances - caused by the loss of revenue from international students - is profound. But must it serve to dictate what universities teach our students for what might be generations to come? </p>
<h2>‘The big issues’</h2>
<p>Sure, musicologists and ethnomusicologists might not be able to repair a hi-fi, but what they can do, as <a href="https://www.monash.edu/arts/music/ethnomusicology-and-musicology">Monash’s own website trumpets</a>, is engage with “big issues” such as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why does music matter? How do understandings of music differ across time, place and culture? How can we help facilitate the sustainability of diverse musical knowledge and practice across the planet for future generations?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Last week, a joint letter signed by over 70 music academics from across the UK, Ireland, Europe, USA, India, Japan, and Australia, was sent to Monash Vice-Chancellor Professor Margaret Gardner.</p>
<p>It asked if there were compelling scholarly and educational reasons for the abolition of these specialisations, and if so, urged the university to make those reasons known. Otherwise, Monash should reconsider its decision.</p>
<p>In fact, the Monash proposal should give us all pause to consider just what kinds of knowledge, ultimately, we still want our public universities to preserve, discover, and teach.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/147172/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Tregear is a Principal Fellow of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne and an Adjunct Professor of the University of Adelaide.</span></em></p>What is musicology and why is it important?Peter Tregear, Principal Fellow, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.