Chapter 20
When Old Australia Dies . . . Is New Australia Ready?
In This Chapter
Making multiculturalism an official policy with Fraser
Embracing a deregulated and open market economy
Choosing sides in the culture wars
Taking two steps forward and one step back with native title
Up until the mid-1970s, an ‘old Australia’ still existed — a nation in many ways unchanged since the first decades after Federation. Even with the baby boomers and social libertarians of the 1960s, not to mention the Whitlam typhoon of the early 1970s (refer to Chapter 19 for all of these), where everyone was loudly talking about change, a basic continuity with the previous decades still prevailed.
Economic policies were still geared to a ‘Fortress Australia’ mentality, wages were still centrally fixed, and capital inflows to the country were heavily regulated. At the same time, the old White Australia Policy was still maintained in deed, if not in word — despite prime ministers Holt and Whitlam both proclaiming the end of the old restrictions on non-European migrants (as covered in Chapter 19), the ethnic make-up of Australia’s migrants was almost 100 per cent European.
Within 20 years, all that was gone. Migrants were now arriving from all over the world, labour and financial markets had been deregulated, and tariffs had been massively scaled back. Australia was an open and robust economy playing to its strengths in world trade. Simultaneously, fierce arguments were taking place about which elements of past Australian social and cultural values and practices should be maintained and which should be junked.
Ultimately, in a sink or swim world, Australia was learning how to float. In this chapter, I chart the way these changes were made, the dramatic and panicked responses they produced and the ultimate effects they had.
The Coming of Malcolm Fraser
After demolishing Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the 1975 election, Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser dominated the political scene until 1983. Like Whitlam, Fraser was committed to making sure Australia played its part as a ‘good global citizen’; however, his vision of what this actually meant differed markedly from his predecessor’s.
For Fraser, Australia’s global role included a strong commitment to the alliance with the US and to anti-communism. He repeatedly warned against the Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean and pushed for expanded American communication stations in Australia. Australia’s role also involved creating a more multicultural society and a willingness to countenance large-scale influxes of Indochinese refugees from the Vietnam War — something Whitlam had made clear his distaste for.
Launching the good ship Multi-Culti
One of Fraser’s greatest achievements was the active launch of a serious new social policy — multiculturalism — which managed to widen most Australians’ circle of mutual tolerance beyond that of Europeans to include practically all ethnic groups in the world.
In August 1973, Whitlam’s Immigration Minister, the flamboyant Al Grassby, had made a speech entitled ‘A multi-cultural society for the future’, the first time ‘multicultural’ had featured in the department’s rhetoric. Multiculturalism was a profoundly new idea — of finding ‘greater strength in diversity’ — and Grassby was loudly proclaiming to Asian nations that the old discredited White Australia Policy was ‘dead and buried’. But the actual effect on policy and immigration was slight, as Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew tartly pointed out in the same month: Australia, he said, would take skilled Asians but ‘not our hewers of wood or our drawers of water’.
Taking in Vietnamese refugees
By the time Fraser took over in 1975, the migrant intake had been slashed from 140,000 (in 1971) to 50,000, largely as a response to the economic problems of inflation and unemployment (refer to Chapter 19). Of this intake, only 1,000 were refugees. Of the top seven nations supplying migrants to Australia, not one was a nation from the three continents closest to Australia — Asia, Africa and South America.
Fraser was the first prime minister in Australian history to insist on and oversee a large-scale intake of non-European migrants. In real terms rather than rhetorical terms, the old White Australia Policy ends here.
Fraser restored the Immigration Department (after Whitlam abolished it) and returned to high migration levels, as new migrants from the Asian region began arriving. The first Vietnamese ‘boat people’ began arriving in April 1976, and the public barely noticed. In 1977, boat numbers grew and by 1979 the government realised it had a crisis on its hands. Fraser’s solution was to stop the numbers at their source — joining with other nations to pressure the Vietnamese Government to change its approach, and agreeing to take substantial numbers of refugees from South-East Asian refugee camps.
By the end of 1982, Australia had accepted some 70,000 Indochinese refugees (only 2,059 of whom were unauthorised boat arrivals), the biggest number of refugees per head of population accepted by any nation in the world. In 1971, only 717 people in Australia were of Vietnamese birth. By 1981, this number had increased tenfold; Vietnam was Australia’s biggest regional migrant source, with 29 per cent of migrants coming from there. By 1991, 124,800 people in Australia were of Vietnamese birth.
Fraser told his immigration minister that accepting Vietnamese refugees was an ethical obligation, arguing ‘we were fighting alongside these people’ (in the Vietnam War).
Implementing multiculturalism
Fraser also implemented the findings of the 1978 Review of Migrant Services (known as the ‘Galbally Report’), which concluded that ‘further steps to multiculturalism are needed’. For Fraser, the further steps included establishing an Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs, a new special broadcasting service channel (SBS) that aimed to cater for a more multicultural audience (see the sidebar ‘Introducing multicultural television for all Australians’ for more details), and a government commitment to responding more actively to the needs of migrant communities of different ethnic backgrounds. This was a policy direction that the Hawke Government (which replaced the Fraser Government in 1983) would also adopt and pursue.
With the passing of 30 years, the introduction of a more multicultural form of Australian citizenship can be seen to have been remarkably successful. Since 1947, Australia has absorbed some 7 million new arrivals — the highest per capita absorption of any nation in the world except Israel. Today, one in four Australians was born overseas — compared to, say, the US, the classic ‘melting pot’ society, where one in ten people was born overseas. And while between 1947 and 1975, practically all new arrivals were from Europe, from 1976 the top nations of origin have included Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India and China. Census figures show that by the early 2000s, the main countries of birth aside from Australia were an extraordinarily rich bag — Britain, New Zealand, Italy, China, Vietnam, Greece, India, the Philippines, Germany and South Africa. Given all this, the most remarkable thing about the diverse backgrounds of modern-day Australians is not the occasional flashpoint of antagonism (such as the ugly race riots at Cronulla in 2005) but just how little ethnic tension there is.
Fraser foiled! By shifting economic sands
Fraser provided a sense of stability after the tumult of the Whitlam years, but the same economic problems that fatally handicapped Whitlam also brought Fraser down. The long boom of prosperity that lasted in Australia from the late 1940s to the early 1970s was over, and the basic policy settings that had guided Australian economic life in this period were no longer producing the same results. Fraser’s economic traditionalism, and his inability to fix the financial and trade problems that beset Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, ultimately doomed his prime ministership.
Fraser’s economic policies seemed to imply that he thought the only reason economic bad times had hit was because Whitlam had messed things up. This was partly true — Whitlam and all except his last treasurer (Bill Hayden) set a new benchmark for fiscal irresponsibility — but it ignored the dramatic global collapse in areas that had supported Australia’s long boom. Fraser governed with the expectation that the economy would soon return to normal with zero policy change away from the old orthodoxies — plenty of industry protection and corporate tax breaks, and no changes at all to central wage fixing.
Fraser tried cutting government expenditure and managed to push inflation down a little but in 1978 unemployment surged past 400,000, with the unemployment rate hitting 6.3 per cent in 1978 and 1979. Whitlam had made a dramatic start to dismantling Australia’s trade barriers in 1973 when he cut tariffs by 25 per cent. In a bid to lower unemployment, Fraser increased tariffs again for the automotive, textile, clothing and footwear industries. In the long run this was a blind alley — it was left to the Hawke Labor Government to again wind back the protective barriers.
Life, Fraser had said in another context, wasn’t meant to be easy. When it came to the economy in the 1970s, it seemed especially not meant to be easy, particularly when those in power and influence were steadfastly ignoring the writing on the wall.
Deregulation Nation
Beginning in 1983 with the newly elected Labor government of Bob Hawke, a new period of substantial economic reform began that managed to produce short-term excess, medium-term crisis and unemployment, and long-term prosperity and success. The main changes were:
Financial deregulation between 1983 and 1985
Cut-backs to tariff protection between 1988 and 1991
Moves to a more flexible enterprise-based wages system between 1992 and 2007
Deregulating the financial and labour markets as well as dismantling the old protectionist tariff barriers that underpinned the heavy subsidies of ‘Fortress Australia’ radically reshaped Australia’s trajectory in the world. These reforms took place thanks to the stewardship of three very different prime ministers from the two major political parties: Hawke and Paul Keating from Labor, and John Howard from the Liberals.
All three had to face down significant opposition from economic traditionalists within their own parties. All three produced compromises that ultimately helped to free up Australia’s economic growth in a balanced way — making Australia far more open and dynamic than, say, the social welfare states of many European nations, while avoiding the harsher extremes reached by committed free traders Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the US.
Welcoming in ‘Hawke’s World’
Bob Hawke was a larrikin — fond of drinking, womanising and hanging out with his mates. He was also an incredibly sharp mind and good advocate, winning a Rhodes scholarship and becoming firstly the Australian Council of Trade Union’s legal advocate and then its president. One of the most popular people in public affairs in the late 1970s, Hawke decided to mend his ways and take a shot at the country’s highest office. He gave up the grog and swore off the women (well, mostly), and in September 1980 retired as president of the ACTU to become a member of parliament for the Labor Party.
In February 1983, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser called a snap election. Bob Hawke immediately replaced Bill Hayden as leader of the Labor Party, and Labor went on to a convincing win in the national election on 5 March. Hawke was prime minister for the rest of the decade, eventually being replaced by the ex-treasurer Paul Keating.
A gregarious egalitarian, in his time as prime minister Hawke built an enviable reputation for overseeing dramatic change without alienating too many people. Although by the end of his time in office he would be open to the accusation of trying to please and appease everyone (‘old jellyback’, Keating called him derisively), for the first few years Hawke built up a remarkable record of introducing massive changes through agreement and consensus rather than confrontation.
At a meeting of Labor’s Federal Executive just before Hawke became leader, he wrote down on the back of an envelope three words — Reconciliation, Recovery and Reconstruction — and told everyone ‘this is what we should go into the election with’. They did, and it worked.
Other key words in Hawke’s platform included:
Consultation
Retraining
Relocation
Consensus
Striking an Accord
In April 1983, just a month after being elected, Hawke held a National Economic Summit in Canberra, aiming to reach agreement between unions, employers and government on the best way to proceed in fixing the economy. At the summit, Hawke reached an agreement with the unions to keep wage-claims down — the Prices and Income Accord.
The new Accord meant that the Labor Government and the unions now owned the domain of arbitration and centralised wage fixing. They used it to drastically bring down the amount of days lost to strikes, produce more jobs and grow productivity.
In exchange for union restraint, the government pledged to bring inflation down to manageable levels, make room for more jobs and higher levels of productivity, and provide better services. The Accord worked — about 1.5 million jobs were created through the rest of the 1980s, and unemployment dropped from its 1983 peak of 10 per cent to 6 per cent in 1989. Periodically renewed, the Accord lasted for the next 13 years, and covered wages, taxes and superannuation.
Floating the dollar
In 1983, Australia’s exchange rate, which had always been tightly regulated, was beginning to founder badly, unable to cope with the vast new amounts of speculative and investment capital that were washing round the globe. Speculators took advantage of Australia’s fixed rate of exchange, pumping large amounts of short-term capital into Australia, forcing the dollar upward in value and taking the profits. Both Hawke and Treasurer Keating became convinced that it was no longer feasible to defend an unsustainable exchange rate against the market. As Keating succinctly put it: ‘There’s too much money out there’. The idea was to let the value of the Australian dollar float freely. This way, speculators would no longer be betting against the government, but against each other.
To the head bureaucrat at the Treasury — John Stone, the most respected Treasury chief in living memory — this seemed like pure madness. Stone argued Australia was a small nation that shouldn’t be left completely vulnerable to the whims of global capital. Meanwhile, the chief of the Reserve Bank, Bob Johnston, argued the opposite. Between these two divergent views, another uncomfortable fact for Hawke and Keating was that their Labor Party had always been strongly against any deregulation of the fixed exchange rate.
Events came to a head at the beginning of December 1983. International funds poured into Australia to exploit another revaluation of the Australian dollar. The authorities couldn’t keep the momentum in check, and looked in danger of being completely overwhelmed. In the week leading up to Friday 9 December, international financiers had targeted Australia with a total of $8 billion. The Reserve Bank’s attempts to control monetary flow to contain inflation were falling apart, and the bank was forced to buy almost $1.5 billion in just a few days. The bank and the government could no longer maintain reasonable and sustainable monetary management.
On Thursday 8 December, in an argument that went all Thursday night and into Friday morning, Hawke, Keating, their advisers, and (on the phone) Johnston, all pitted themselves against the established economic orthodoxy of Stone. In the early hours of Friday morning, the decision was finally made. At 5 pm Friday, Keating and Johnston appeared together at a press conference to announce that the Australian dollar was to be floated and allowed to find its own value on the international market.
It’s difficult to overestimate the significance of this act, not only for the real and immediate practical effect it had but for the tidal shift in Australia’s governing psychology. Johnston later unhesitatingly declared it ‘The decision of the decade . . . It was the overt breaking of our isolationism. Without it, there is the mentality of living behind the moat. The float linked the Australian economy, for better or worse, with the rest of the world. It would teach us some very severe lessons but we [had] to learn those lessons’.
Breaking the protection racket
The Australian nation came into being in 1901 as a kind of fortress — psychological, economic and social. A key plank of this fortress was a wall of protective tariffs that meant that local industries, particularly manufacturers, could survive without being threatened by cheaper competitors from around the world.
The cost of keeping other, cheaper goods and capital investment out of Australia became increasingly apparent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When from 1966 the Tariff Board began to publicise the level of tariff assistance received by each industry, people slowly became aware of just how astronomically high the costs of subsidising industries were, and public debate began.
Although Gough Whitlam made a dramatic across-the-board 25 per cent tariff rate cut to all industries, it was with Hawke that the real and intricate work of long-term structural adjustments and winding-back of tariffs began.
Feeling the effects of short-term excess
In 1986, the number of Australian millionaires passed 30,000 for the first time. In the same year, Australia’s gross foreign debt passed $100 billion. In the new era of deregulated finance, plenty of easy credit was available, and ordinary households eagerly took advantage of it — as did a brash new generation of entrepreneurs.
A pinch of 1980s excess . . .
After financial deregulation, an explosion of credit lending occurred. For the five years prior to 1983, annual credit growth had been 16 per cent. For the five years after 1983, it jumped to 21 per cent. Business debt increased massively and many households took out big loans to buy assets and houses. Two decades of high inflation made people decide that the best thing to do was gear up on debt and buy assets that would (they assumed) rapidly increase in value.
Throughout the 1980s, larrikin, buccaneering individualist types took over the companies previously run by the financial ‘establishment’ and stripped them of assets. These people were brash; they were crass; they were — for a brief span of time in the 1980s —Australian heroes. Hawke and Keating loved them, declaring them to be the new spirit of daring Australians who were roughing up the old protected environment of the banking establishment. Australian people started to like them, particularly after one of them — Alan Bond — bankrolled a successful bid to beat the US and win the America’s Cup yachting race. Others, like Christopher Skase of Qintex, and John Elliott of Fosters Corporation, became well known as well.
Between 1983 and 1987
Banks kept lending
Credit kept expanding
Lenders were competing wildly
Add to that, fast population growth and the larrikin ‘buccaneer’ mentality, and you have a recipe for a wildly inflating bubble.
. . . Followed by the worst and most protracted recession in 60 years
During the second half of the 1980s, manic excess took over. The shift from the closed economic shop of the 1970s had been partially successful, but the Labor Government had created an imbalance. Freeing up the financial market while leaving heavy centralised labour regulations and distortions in the real economy meant that, even with the increased credit, it was difficult to increase real productivity. But the government had lost any appetite for continued reforms. After the 1987 election victory, complacency had set in, and the boom went into unsustainable overdrive. Inflation started spiralling upwards.
The government’s Accord agreement with the unions was underwritten by the commitment to be always pushing for growth: Real wage cuts in exchange for more jobs. This made it very difficult to slow things down when the economy was going too fast. Instead, the government tried an interest rate crunch. Between autumn 1987 and January 1990, interest rates were pushed up and up until they hit an incredible 20 per cent.
In October 1987, share prices on Australian stock exchanges took a record fall. In 1989, several large corporations — Ecuiticorp, Qintex, Hooker Corporation and Spedley Securities — collapsed, to be followed by others. The brash stars of the 1980s, such as Skase, Bond and Elliott, began to crash and burn.
The hopes for a soft mild landing proved impossible. Instead, an acute contraction set in — in other words, a recession. Both Hawke and Keating had boasted that with their brave new dawn of a new economic era, recessions were no longer necessary. Now they were humiliated, although Keating tried to brush it off as ‘the recession we had to have’ (which didn’t go down too well with the electorate).
In 1990, the OECD declared Australia fourth on the list of nations in debt (behind Brazil, Mexico and the USSR). The Victorian State Government alone was $32 billion in debt as Australia’s foreign debt hit $95 billion. Farm returns fell by 8.1 per cent. Telstra, the major (state-owned) telecommunications company, slashed jobs by 2,500. In the four months to September 1990, the jobless rate jumped by 60,000.
Although ultimately salutary for the Australian economy, the recession meant tough times for a lot of people. The road back would be hard and protracted.
Deregulating the labour market
The old system of arbitration in Australia that had been functioning for most of the 20th century centred on Justice Higgins’s landmark 1907 Harvester Judgement, which insisted that a ‘fair and reasonable wage’ was the basic and inalienable right of Australian workers (refer to Chapter 12).
The deregulation of the Australian labour market — deregulating centralised wage fixation, and shifting to enterprise bargaining between bosses and workers — was begun by Labor Prime Minister Keating in the early 1990s. But it was Liberal Prime Minister John Howard (who beat Keating in the 1996 election) who really ran with the idea. As far back as August 1983, John Howard announced: ‘The time has come when we have to turn Mr Justice Higgins on his head’.
In 1993, Keating called for a new model of industrial relations based on enterprise bargaining between bosses and workers. Under Keating, arbitrated wage rises would be kept as a simple safety net for the minimum payable wage, rather than an overarching structure determining what everyone got paid.
The 1996 Coalition election policy was to keep the award system but also introduce individual agreements, establishing a ‘no losers’ pledge, which meant no worker would lose pay in deregulated reforms. This was crucial for most Australians — the ‘no disadvantage’ test would be incorporated after the Liberal 1996 election win in the new Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs).
John Howard would learn just how important Australians felt this ‘no disadvantage’ test was when, after his 2004 election win, he brought in Work Choices, the next phase in workplace deregulation and individual bargaining, which didn’t include such a test. Work Choices helped create 500,000 jobs over 18 months, but many workers in the electorate saw it as a policy that provided unfair advantages to businesses. The new jobs didn’t stop the electorate throwing Howard out at the next election, after a campaign run entirely on the pros and cons of Work Choices.
Fighting the Culture Wars
Paul Keating and John Howard danced around each other for over 15 years. Between 1977 and 1991, the Department of Treasury was the domain of first Howard then Keating. Between 1991 and 2007, the office of prime minister was occupied by first Keating then Howard. Both of them were converts to the idea of making Australia a more open and competitive, wealth-producing economy. But each strove to connect these changes with different strands of the Australian character, with one (Howard) being socially conservative and mainstream and the other (Keating) being a global progressive more sympathetic to cultural elites. Howard and Keating became lightning rods for two very different brands of Australian cultural identity.
Keating’s government put more and more resources into its Arts and Aboriginal programs, and its cultural policies. In 1993, in the midst of the recession, the Arts received a 10 per cent funding increase. Keating followed this with a ‘Creative Nation’ announcement in 1994, which promised the Arts an extra $200 million, and put an extra $100 million per year aside for Aboriginal programs.
Howard saw himself as mainstream rather than establishment, and on the side of ordinary Australian families against the generation of intellectuals who had come of age during the Whitlam government and who now were in ascendancy in the policy-making institutions. By the time Howard’s government left office, he was funnelling an incredible $29.7 billion into family support for low- and middle-income families — bigger than annual spending for defence!
Both Keating and Howard were ‘cultural warriors’, fighting hard to defend their ideas of what Australia should stand for. Both played favourites, endeavouring to reward those in the cultural sphere who mirrored their own views, while seeking to marginalise their cultural enemies. Popularly referred to as ‘the culture wars’, Keating and Howard were the two principle antagonists in this argument, but both had armies of more than willing foot soldiers.
Keating fires the starting gun
Keating was a strange and intriguing combination for an Australian politician. Cutthroat and ambitious, he was from the legendary (and notorious) right faction of NSW Labor, the members of which were known for their merciless attitude. As Hawke’s treasurer from 1983, Keating had been largely responsible (along with Finance Minister Peter Walsh) for introducing many of the economic reforms that changed Australia beyond recognition. When he began a campaign to unseat Hawke as prime minister, he made it clear that he wasn’t content with completely overhauling Australia’s economic mechanics — he wanted to do the same with Australia’s self-image.
At the annual Press Gallery dinner in December 1990, Keating let rip on Australia’s need for leadership at a critical time, when it was ‘teetering on the brink’ of becoming a great nation. And he was just the chap to take us there. Once he became prime minister in 1991, Keating didn’t lose much time.
Keating hated the dominant cultural tradition that emphasised Australia’s connection with Britain, seeing it as provincial and colonial. He taunted the Liberal Party in parliament for kowtowing to the British, saying ‘even as it walked out on you and joined the Common Market, you were looking for your MBEs and your knighthoods and all the rest of the regalia that comes with it . . . You can go back to the fifties, to your nostalgia, your Menzies . . . and the whole lot. They were not aggressively Australian, they were not aggressively proud of our culture and we will have no bar of you and your sterile ideology’. One observer described the roar of approval from Labor’s backbench as unlike anything heard in the parliament for years. The speaker of the House, meanwhile, told Howard that he was going to have a heart attack if his face went any redder.
Keating was the first radical nationalist of either major party to be prime minister, and certainly the first to actively repudiate Australia’s past security, trade and cultural alliances with Britain. Instead, Keating tried to completely integrate Australian culture into the Asian region, and even went on to declare that the flag would probably have to go — arguing Australia shouldn’t have ‘the flag of another country [the Union Jack] in the corner of it’.
Keating was declaring that Australia had to chart a radical new path away from its Australo-Briton past, saying that just as the economic realities had been turned on their head in the 1980s, so too should the cultural assumptions. Keating wanted a new kind of national patriotism, and many urban progressives and cultural elites were wildly enthusiastic at the idea.
What he and his supporters didn’t count on was Howard also coming up with a new and reworked idea of national image, which would entwine certain traditional elements of Australian culture with its new economic and military presence on the world stage.
Bumps on the multi-culti road
While the Review of Migrant Services in 1978 (see the section ‘Launching the good ship Multi-Culti’ earlier in this chapter) had established multiculturalism as the new social policy to encourage tolerance and diversity in Australian life, the change was not entirely smooth. By the late 1980s, the multicultural and migration programs were attracting criticism on economic and cultural grounds, as follows:
Economic: The high migration program was creating short-term economic problems in ‘social infrastructure’, inflating house prices and increasing pressures in the big cities. Some of those selected as migrants were not proving to be particularly beneficial to Australia’s economic life — family reunion was now becoming a dominant factor in selecting potential migrants rather than the economic or skill-set contribution they could make to Australia. The unemployment rate for non–English speaking recent immigrants in Australia (‘recent’ means living in the country for less than 12 months) was 42 per cent. In some ethnic communities, this rate was as high as 87 per cent. This was completely different to the immigration program’s situation in the postwar decades up to the 1980s.
Cultural: For some people, the government didn’t seem to place enough emphasis on making new migrants commit to perceived Australian values and loyalty. By the late 1980s, the new multiculturalism didn’t seem to allow any room for an avowal of Australia’s distinctive characteristics and values. Ex-Labor minister Peter Walsh described the prevailing mentality in the social progressive left and multicultural lobby as ‘all other cultures are superior to the liberal democratic, mostly Anglo-Celtic culture, which has been pervasive in Australia for a hundred years or more’.
Walsh went on to ask, with feeling, ‘what psychotic disorder, what deep-seated self-loathing, causes people who are the beneficiaries of that [Australian liberal democratic] heritage to constantly vilify and denigrate it?’ The language here is extreme, and gives some idea of the sense of outraged besiegement that many mainstream Australians were feeling at the loudly broadcast and radically new ideal of Australian identity.
In 1988, Hawke set up a Committee to Advise on Australia’s Immigration Policies, chaired by Dr Stephen Fitzgerald. Subsequently known as the Fitzgerald Report, the committee’s findings surprised and annoyed Hawke by making criticisms of the current migration and multicultural model, reporting a widespread collapse in approval of both high immigration and multiculturalism. People were suspicious, concluded the report, about ‘special deals’ and ‘professional ethnics’ — favours being doled out to ethnic lobby groups both inside and outside the government.
The next year a public document was produced: The National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia. The document argued that the best thing for Australia to do was to strike a balance — guaranteeing cultural rights and social justice to all Australians (whether Aboriginal, British-Australian or non-English speaking background), but maintaining also ‘an overriding and unifying commitment to Australia’. Citizenship and equality should be made big enough and strong enough to encompass ethnic and linguistic diversity.
This document was an attempt to swing the pendulum back to the centre, but was an early victim of the culture wars. Keating attacked his political opponents (mainly Howard) for not embracing the new multicultural Australia, and made moves to abandon all previous ties of British loyalty and integrate entirely into the Asian region. Howard in turn attacked Keating for selling out the core values of mainstream Australians. The pendulum was swinging wildly back and forth from one extreme to another.
Howard versus the ‘brain class’
John Howard established himself as treasurer in the Fraser government in 1977 and by the 1980s he was the Liberals’ foremost parliamentary debater and one of its leading thinkers. While an economic radical, he was a cultural conservative, and was badly out of step with the new ‘embrace diversity’ direction being pushed by the Hawke Government in the 1980s. After a gaffe about slowing Asian migration, he was dumped as opposition leader and was thereafter constantly taunted and humiliated by Hawke and Keating for being a relic of the Menzies past.
When Howard finally came to power in 1996, he was determined to change the nature of cultural debate in the country, and to relax the tight strictures that had been applied by the Hawke government, the multicultural lobby groups and the generally left-leaning intelligentsia (more crudely dubbed ‘the chattering classes’). These groups had, in Howard’s opinion, ensured any voices of questioning or dissent were consistently marginalised or vilified. He famously (or notoriously) declared that he wanted a ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia. Relaxed with itself and its past, and comfortable about its place in the world, without needing to apologise or ingratiate.
Howard’s alienation from the ‘brain class’ — the university-educated professionals, academics, ‘creatives’ (from areas such as film and television), and multicultural and indigenous lobby groups and leaders — encouraged him to forge a bond with the ‘ordinaries’. Howard focused on everyday mainstream Australians with typical Australian aspirations (such as home ownership, prosperity and good education for their children) and values (such as fairness, tolerance, having a go, showing initiative, and not seeking or providing special treatment or deals).
Although Howard didn’t like multiculturalism — he dropped the department devoted to multicultural affairs — he was fine with different cultures and people arriving in Australia. Over the course of his prime ministership, Howard raised migration levels to historically high levels. But rather than the multicultural emphasis on diversity, he insisted on a greater emphasis on loyalty to what he saw as Australia’s universal values of egalitarianism, freedom and tolerance.
Howard so liked his version of old Australian values that when setting up a referendum vote for a new preamble to the constitution he even tried to have ‘mateship’ inserted (his efforts didn’t last long).
Howard’s relations with Aboriginal leaders and Aboriginal groups started badly and got worse. He was publicly humiliated at a Reconciliation Convention in May 1997, when the audience stood up and turned their backs on him. He lost his temper and started berating them from the platform, banging the lectern angrily. Howard’s actions weren’t a good look for a prime minister, and it was an ugly incident that ended badly for both prime minister and his audience. Aboriginals refused to negotiate with Howard’s side of politics — the side that happened to be in power for the next 11 years — relegating them to the margins of influence. Howard’s incapacity to reach out and bring Aboriginals into his national conversation is ultimately a mark against him, and a sign of his own limitations as a leader.
Pauline Hanson enters the debate (and turns Howard’s head)
Pauline Hanson was a Liberal candidate in the Queensland seat of Oxley in the 1996 election campaign when she made a series of race-based comments that the Liberal Party thought offensive (and politically disastrous) enough to disendorse her. She ran instead as an independent, commenting freely on the problems of Australia, including special deals for ‘the Aboriginal industry’ and ‘too many Asians’. She won her seat with a landslide of votes.
In April 1997, Hanson launched the One Nation Party at Ipswich Civic Hall. Her policy aims were to
Restrict foreign ownership
Restore tariffs
Cut or halt immigration
Restore equality between Australian citizens
Reject the ‘Aboriginal industry’
Reject multiculturalism
Hansonism, as it became known, was a reaction against both the cultural and economic revolutions of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Hanson attracted strong support from those who felt they’d been left behind and left out of the new national direction. The opening up of the economy and removal of tariff supports and subsidies had been enormously beneficial for some industries but had spelt the death knell for others. Many felt that culturally established notions of Australian nationhood were being up-ended. The deepness and severity of the early 1990s recession had meant large-scale job losses, at the same time as older notions of nationhood were being disavowed in preference for Aboriginal rights and multicultural diversity.
At the Queensland state election in June 1998, regional Queensland deserted the National Party (traditionally the party for regional voters) for Pauline Hanson. Urban Liberals, angry at Howard’s failure to denounce Hanson’s attitudes, went to the Labor Party. In the final count, One Nation won 11 seats.
The effect of One Nation’s success was immediate. In response, Howard went populist. He cut immigration (it went from 82,560 in 1996 to 68,000 in 1998) and froze tariff cuts. For a long while, Howard also held back from criticising Hanson’s views and policy proposals, partly because he said he liked the fact that people now felt free to air their views, and partly because he didn’t want to lose the votes of all the people who liked what Hanson was saying. (Howard did eventually publicly condemn Hanson.)
Even with Howard’s changes, One Nation still received over 1 million votes (or 8 per cent of the primary vote) in the 1998 federal election, nearly costing the Liberal Party their win.
In the end, Hanson was brought down not by electoral defeat but by the shonky work of her own political party. Investigation revealed that the party had been set up to run not as a political organisation but as a business. While Hanson spent time in jail, the culture wars raged on without her.
Battling Over Native Title
Caught up in the culture wars, but also playing along beside them, was the fight for Aboriginal land rights. In 1992 and 1996, the High Court made two legal rulings that transformed the status of indigenous land ownership and land right claims.
The doctrine of terra nullius (in Latin meaning ‘land belonging to no-one’) had been the legally defined state of Australian land when Cook arrived in 1770 and laid claim to the east coast of Australia. The British argument at the time was that even though people were obviously living on Australian soil, because they weren’t involved in heavily cultivating or ostensibly ‘improving’ the land, but were living nomadically, they did not have any legitimate legal title to the land. (Yep — it sounded a bit dodgy at the time as well.)
When the High Court overturned the doctrine of terra nullius in the 1990s, the consequences were dramatic.
Acting on the Mabo judgement
In the Mabo judgement of June 1992, the High Court found that, having demonstrated unbroken ongoing cultural connection with the land, the Meriam people (from some of the Torres Strait Islands) had a common law right to native title.
Once the judgement was announced, Prime Minister Keating was keen to ensure it would have more wide-reaching ramifications, using the judgement as a beginning of not only a new series of land management and access laws, but as a tool for initiating reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. His feeling, strongly felt by many others, was that all of Australian society’s achievements and prosperity had been built on an original act of dispossession of Australia’s first owners, and that Australia as a nation would never be able to rest easy with itself until some serious recognition had been made of this.
In 1992, in what became known as the Redfern Speech, Keating said that the problems that continued between black and white Australians were some of the central challenges that Australians still had to resolve. He suggested that this resolution might begin ‘with an act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us . . . We failed to ask, how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us’.
Aboriginal leaders and the Labor Government were involved in intense negotiations to draw up native title legislation after the Mabo judgement. This legislation was passed through parliament before Christmas 1993.
The Liberal–National coalition were bitterly opposed to the legislation, and felt that mainstream Australia had been shut out of the conversation and the negotiations. Three years later, the Coalition would return to power, and it would be Howard, not Keating, who would be in the driving seat when the next High Court decision on native title — the Wik judgement — was made.
Panicking after the Wik judgement
The Wik judgement of December 1996 found that native title to the Wik people’s traditional lands on the Cape York Peninsula had continued simultaneously with the operation of pastoral leases in the area. This was an enormous change to the Mabo ruling (itself an enormous reversal of the established ‘empty land’ doctrine), which had seemingly established that native title existed only when continuous possession could be proven — not when freehold rights or leases had been granted for the land in question. Wik now stated unequivocally that native title wasn’t necessarily extinguished but could coexist simultaneously with the pastoral leases in the area.
The High Court found (by a narrow 4–3 majority) that pastoral leases were not necessarily exclusive. The Court found that previous communications by the Secretary of State, Earl Grey, to the Governor of New South Wales in 1847 and 1848 made it clear that Aboriginals were not to be excluded from land under pastoral occupation, stating ‘these Leases are not intended to deprive the Natives of their former right to hunt over these Districts, or to wander over them in search of subsistence, in the manner to which they have been heretofore accustomed, from the spontaneous produce’. (Refer to Chapter 7 for more on Earl Grey and his arguments with the colonials.)
The president of the Native Title Tribunal (set up in 1993 to assist with native title claims) said that native title claims on pastoral leases would have to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Negotiation would need to commence between pastoralists, miners and others and local Aboriginal people about gates, fences, vehicles and camping rights. With 40 per cent of Australia covered by pastoral leases, this was big news.
As prime minister, Howard’s job was to pass a new set of laws to deal with the Wik finding. Pastoralists, farmers, miners, Australian populists and conservatives went into meltdown, insisting that laws be made to extinguish any native title that threatened leases. Howard couldn’t do this — in all likelihood it would just be overturned by the High Court. He had to strike a balance, shifting the weight of rights strongly in favour of existing lease-holders without abrogating the entire High Court finding. The Nationals leader, Tim Fischer, promised his constituents that there would be ‘bucketfuls of extinguishment’.
But Howard and Fischer had another problem besides the High Court and furious constituents — the Senate, where they didn’t have the numbers required to pass a bill. The Labor Party, supported by a strong allegiance from Aboriginal leaders, was hostile towards the legislation, and was willing to force an election on the issue.
If Labor had forced an election centred on native title, the outcome would have in all likelihood been disastrous for both Labor and Aboriginal leaders. One Nation’s populist anti-Indigenous rights members would have flooded in on a tide of fear-mongering sentiment. For Howard, the outcome would have been disastrous, too. He may have got some kind of legislation through, but any legitimacy as a prime minister who could claim to be leader of the entire nation would have been destroyed. Independent Senator Brian Harradine said a ‘race election’ ‘would have torn the fabric of our society and set race relations back 40 or 50 years’.
Senator Harradine, who held the balance of power in the Senate, was moved to strike a compromise with Howard to give the Coalition enough numbers to get the legislation through — with some additional amendments. Howard got his laws through, which had enough ‘extinguishment’ in them to placate the farmers and populists, and Australia was saved a race election with the dire consequences that Harradine had predicted for it.
The success of Howard’s negotiated resolution can be seen in that, not much more than a decade later, hardly anyone remembers Wik and its outcome. Mention ‘Wik’ to people and you’ll largely get blank looks. If it had gone to election, the word would be seared into the national consciousness, like ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Great Depression’ or ‘Gallipoli’.
While neither side in the argument got everything they wanted, neither could get everything they wanted without causing greater anger, division and nastiness.