The Australia that had developed by the last decade of the second millennium was something of a paradox. By any measure the majority had increased their real income, yet they were more fearful and less accepting of others. The turning round of the Tampa and its cargo of refugees, some of them fleeing from the Taliban’s rule of terror, seemed to encapsulate Australia’s move away from the Christian principles it had essentially been built on. The ship’s caring Norwegian captain, Arne Rinnan, was startled to see those he had rescued from the sea whisked off to camps on Nauru, where some of them remained for years. In contrast, Australia’s response to the arrival of vast numbers from all over the world in the 1950s, 60s and 70s had been marvellous, with few equivalents elsewhere.
Australia entered the new millennium with a population of just under twenty million, a population which had changed considerably since the 1960s and 70s. The average woman gave birth to 1.7 children (down from 3.5 in 1961), with the first birth at around the age of thirty-two. The infant mortality rate had dropped to six per thousand, down from eighty-two in 1905, twenty-four in 1950 and eighteen in 1970. Life expectancy was eighty-two for women and seventy-six for men. Unemployment was at 10 per cent in 1983, 8.5 per cent in 1995 and 5.6 per cent in 2005, compared with 1.1 per cent in 1951 under Menzies. Life satisfaction was measured at 77.2, happiness at 94.6, both well above the OECD averages of 70.6 and 88.2 respectively.
The pattern of life had changed considerably in the previous decades in ways that are not readily measurable. Less sleep, less exercise, poor diet and less human contact contributed to people being more agitated, as witnessed in the phenomenon of road rage, increased dissatisfaction with body shape and the use of a smaller vocabulary. While none of these symptoms are unique to Australia, they added to the climate of fear, where doors were not opened to strangers, minority groups were vilified on talkback radio, and there were increasing demands for heavy sentences for backsliders. The increase in the prison population to 23,555 in 2003 did not calm these fears. More than one-fifth of those held in Australia’s prisons are indigenous, fifteen of whom die in custody every year. Indigenous Australians are imprisoned at around ten times the rate of the non-indigenous population, suggesting a level of deprivation contrary to the overall happiness rating.
Following Malcolm Fraser’s defeat in 1983, federal politics was dominated by three people: Robert James Lee Hawke, Paul John Keating and John Winston Howard, who became the twenty-third, twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth prime ministers of Australia. It was Keating who linked the era with the new millennium. As Treasurer under Hawke he opened up Australia’s economy by floating the dollar in 1983 and allowing the entry of foreign banks in 1984. Howard was very much in favour of these moves, but when he was elevated to the top job in 1996 he announced that he would be adopting ‘practical solutions’ to indigenous affairs instead of reconciliation, and following the foreign policy of the United States rather than focusing on the Indian Ocean, as Keating had.
Bob Hawke, the Congregational minister’s second son, was probably the most popular leader Australia has ever had, his time with the trade union movement bringing him closer to ordinary Australians. He won elections in March 1983, December 1984, July 1987 and March 1990, something no Labor leader had ever done. The Accords struck with the trade unions led to broad acceptance of lower pay increases in exchange for the social wage (health, education, welfare, pensions etc). Hawke’s team of ministers was exceptional, most of them, like Hawke himself, publicly educated. They included John Button (Industry), Bill Hayden (Foreign Affairs), Kim Beazley (Defence), Brian Howe (Social Services) and Neal Blewett (Health); the full talents of Barry Jones were not used as Minister for Science. The sole woman, Susan Ryan (Education and the Status of Women), found the boys’ club sometimes taxing.
The Catholic-educated Paul Keating became increasingly impatient with being the government’s driving force but not the driver. He understood that Hawke had made an undertaking to gracefully depart Kirribilli House after the 1990 election; instead, Hawke had to be jemmied out in two stages in June and December 1991. The destabilisation of the government caused by leadership tensions meant that little was done to staunch the recession of 1989–91, the economic downturn which Keating famously referred to as ‘the recession we had to have’. Keating was determined to make Australia an independently minded country with its own head of state, an open economy and a flourishing arts community. He also pursued reconciliation with the country’s indigenous people, describing Australia as ‘a black country with a white enclave’ and bringing in legislation to accord with the Mabo Judgement.
On 3 June 1992, the High Court decreed that Native Title existed for land where there was continuing occupation. The Native Title Act of 1993 was steered through with the towering support of Prime Minister Keating, guidance in the Senate by Gareth Evans, and the negotiating skills of Noel Pearson and Frank Brennan SJ. The Queen’s representative, the Hon. Bill Hayden, gave his assent on 24 December 1993. By this act the possum was stirred, and the foundation laid for acceptance of claims for land by a people who had occupied it for up to 60,000 years. The undercurrent of grievance felt by those non-indigenous Australians who considered themselves unfavoured would run into the next millennium.
As Keating’s second term as prime minister drew to a close, the Queensland Premier, Wayne Goss, warned that the people of his state ‘were waiting for Keating with baseball bats’. They certainly were, helping to give the Coalition, led by John Howard, 94 seats out of 148 at the election on 2 March 1996. The publicly educated Howard had had a chequered career since being Treasurer under Fraser in 1983. Thanks to a well-orchestrated challenge, he removed Andrew Peacock as leader of the Liberal Party in September 1985, but a disastrous split in the Coalition caused by Queensland’s maverick premier, Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen, and his ‘Joh for Canberra’ campaign meant Hawke won 86 seats (an increase of four) in 1987. Disunity is political death, a lesson John Howard fully absorbed. Andrew Peacock pounced in May 1989, regaining the leadership and giving Howard more time to contemplate the virtues of unity and doggedness. The wily Hawke beat the younger Peacock in the March 1990 election, winning 78 seats, a reduction of eight.
Subsequently, a lively economist, John Hewson, took over as leader of the Liberals, with John Howard watching cricket and catching up on industrial relations. In March 1993, Hewson managed to lose the ‘unlosable election’, mainly because Paul Keating ridiculed the inconsistencies in the Opposition’s ‘Fightback’ programme. Fightback’s main features were cuts in government spending and a Goods and Services Tax (GST), the latter of which had been favoured by Keating back in 1985.
In a Liberal Party ballot following the election, Hewson beat Howard, retaining the leadership until he was challenged in 1994 by Alexander Downer, scion of the Downer political dynasty. Downer’s penchant for dubious puns, such as using the word ‘batter’ in unfortunate circumstances in relation to women, did not help his leadership last. When Downer stood down on Australia Day 1995, Howard was re-elected leader of the Liberals unopposed. To encourage the wielders of baseball bats he gave a succession of headland speeches in which he laid out his views on a ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia.
When thirteen years of Labor rule ended in March 1996 Paul Keating left parliament, but his shadow remained. Over the succeeding years, Howard praised the virtues of unity above all else. Crossing the floor, tolerated in the Menzies and Fraser eras, rarely happened under Howard, and as Barnaby Joyce was to discover in 2005, it came at great personal cost. Over the years, progressive liberals like Ian McPhee and Fred Chaney were eased out while those who remained, such as Petro Georgiou, Sharman Stone and Marise Payne, were excluded from important positions. A policy of not frightening the horses was followed, which in general meant gradual and sometimes surreptitious change.
The 1996 election produced a new phenomenon as well as a new government: Hansonism. Pauline Hanson was elected as an independent member for the Queensland seat of Oxley, having originally been the Liberal candidate. Because the Liberal Party was tardy in disowning her and having its name removed from her literature, many people voted for her believing she was still the Liberal candidate. At the next federal election in 1998, her One Nation Party won more than 8 per cent of the national vote, having previously won eleven seats in Queensland’s state election. Hanson’s campaign for no more refugees, a fair go for white Australia and a policy of protection found support from the many who felt left behind by Keating’s opening of the market. She was indirectly responsible for the Native Title Amendment Act (Wik) of 1998 and the Tampa crisis of 2001. Her voice was part of a choir that had hitherto only received air time on radio, and which was strongly opposed by those with moral and religious principles.
There were many paradoxes to John Howard’s construction of a ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia. After instituting huge cuts in government spending in the early years, he went on to become the leader of the highest taxing government in Australian history, coming in at about 25 per cent of GDP. These taxes included the GST, which while unpopular when introduced has since become generally accepted. The tax failed to bring an end to the cash economy, which avoided it altogether. Due to pressure from the Democrats and their leader, Meg Lees, who held the balance of power in 1999, food was made exempt from the GST, making the 10 per cent increase on everything else more palatable. The GST Act was passed in July 1999, at which time the first one-third sale of Telstra went ahead with the support of independent senator, Brian Harradine. Contrary to his interpretation of Catholic principles, Harradine had earlier allowed the Wik legislation to pass.
The 2001 election was not decided by the GST, nor a slight slump in the economy, for John Howard won convincingly, with 82 seats to 68. Adjustments to petrol tax and a more generous budget from the Treasurer, Peter Costello, had helped to restore confidence in John Howard, and there was a dramatic rise in support after the Norwegian container ship Tampa, with its pathetic cargo of thirsty refugees, was turned around in August 2001. Support for Howard increased further after the September 11 attack on New York’s Twin Towers. John Howard was in Washington DC when the city was attacked, the first time it had been since 1814. This time the British leapt to their former colony’s aid, as did Howard. He invoked the ANZUS Treaty, overlooking the fact that the preamble makes it clear that the treaty’s aim is ‘to keep the peace in the Pacific area’. His campaign phrase ‘we will decide who comes into our country and the circumstances under which they come’ appealed to Pauline Hanson’s former supporters.
John Howard was often seen as being on the point of retiring or being challenged, yet he always managed to come back even stronger. He often put his opponents in a spin, as happened between the 2001 and 2004 elections when Simon Crean, the old boy of both Melbourne High and the ACTU, took over the Labor leadership. Crean made adjustments to the method of selection of candidates but this did not answer criticisms of stalwarts like John Button and Barry Jones, who held that the ‘party was weak on policy development and its candidates had too little life experience’, being predominantly union or party workers.
The war in Iraq began in March 2003. Under John Howard, Australia joined the quartet of countries that toppled Saddam Hussein, invading without United Nations approval, only to see Iraq descend into violence on an unexpected scale. In February 2003 the streets of the world had rung to the sound of the marching feet of millions who opposed the invasion, including half a million Australians. As with Germany’s Million Man March in July 1914, the marchers were noted but their message was ignored. John Howard believed the alliance with the United States was essential and he was prepared to give peripheral support to the invasion, with Tony Blair and George Bush supplying the firepower and military personnel. While the Labor Party under Crean opposed any invasion not sanctioned by the UN, it was not able to get its message of opposition across to the Australian people.
On 2 December 2003 a meteor struck the political scene: Mark Latham was elected Labor leader by the narrowest of margins. At forty-two, the Hurlstone Agricultural High School boy, author of six books and protégé of Gough Whitlam, had great expectations, as did many in the country. His emphasis on ‘child reading’ and ‘the ladder of opportunity’ seemed to catch the normally sharp Howard off guard, but when Latham called for Australian troops to be out of Iraq by Christmas 2004 he was attacked by both the government and the press, portrayed as wanting to ‘cut and run’. On the plus side, he did manage to make amendments to the Free Trade Treaty with the USA, in particular in relation to pharmaceuticals.
The meteor spluttered after the 2004 elections, the results of which indicated in no uncertain terms that the electorate trusted John Howard. The Coalition increased its seats in the House of Representatives to 87; more importantly, it had control of the Senate, something which had not happened since the early 80s. The key elements were the surprise election of the National Party’s Barnaby Joyce in Queensland, and a peculiar preference decision by the ALP which saw Steve Fielding win a Senate seat for Family First in Victoria. This gave the Coalition a majority of 39–37, and John Howard was thus able to realise his big legislative ambitions in 2005: full privatisation of Telstra, industrial relations reforms of epoch-making proportions, stringent anti-terror laws and volunteer student unionism. The prospect of all this had been too much for Mark Latham, who resigned as Labor leader and from parliament in January 2005, after another bout of pancreatitis. The meteor had fallen, only to rise in another form as The Latham Diaries, published by Melbourne University Publishing and the ever-active Louise Adler. Latham’s attacks on Labor’s lack of direction and the composition of the party representatives had much in common with those of Jones and Button only a few years earlier, but the personal vitriol pushed the party into further decline.
These continued to divide the country in the new millennium. The refugees held in detention centres, immigration scandals, death penalties, incarceration in privately run prisons, anti-terror laws, abortion – in all of these issues, John Howard took a position which he perceived as that of the average Australian’s, which was usually harsh. In the noughties Australia accepted around 12,000 refugees per year, out of its global share of more than 600,000. A steady stream of boat people had arrived via Indonesia from countries where opportunities for visas were very limited, such as Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Detention centres, created under Gerry Hand’s Ministry in the Hawke–Keating era, had been expanded at Port Hedland in Western Australia and Baxter in South Australia. Those arriving without visas were held for as long as seven years, in demoralising conditions, a situation which drew much public opposition. Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone eventually set about reducing the numbers of detainees, particularly children, after pressure from backbenchers led by Petro Georgiou.
By 2005 it was apparent that the culture of the Immigration Department was stained. In 2001 Vivian Alvarez Solon, a Philippines-born Australian citizen, had been deported as an illegal immigrant and suspected sex worker. She was later found living in a hospice in the Philippines, having received no medical help in Australia despite her obvious physical and mental health problems. The mistake was discovered in 2003 but covered up, and Solon eventually returned to Australia two years later, to the grudging apologies of the government. In 2004 Cornelia Rau, a permanent resident of German birth, was imprisoned by the police and sent to Baxter detention centre as an illegal immigrant. She clearly had mental problems but she too received no suitable treatment. Religious groups were united in their dismay at the treatment of these women.
Capital punishment is an emotive issue at most times, and in Australia it has not been carried out since 1967. Four Australians have since been executed overseas: Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers in Malaysia in 1986, Michael McAuliffe in Malaysia in 1993 and Caleb Nguyen Van Tuong in Singapore in 2005. In the case of Barlow and Chambers, Bob Hawke pleaded for clemency in a dignified way and described their deaths as barbaric. Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad bristled, and he responded no differently to Paul Keating’s pleas in 1993. John Howard was in a dilemma in 2005. He was close friends with George Bush, who had signed 152 death warrants as Governor of Texas and whose country’s human-rights record puts it at odds with the European Union. Howard made his request for clemency to Singapore’s Catholic-educated Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, but without the passion of Lex Lasry, who defended Nguyen pro bono. Howard’s and Latham’s support for the use of firing squads in Indonesia following the Bali bombings had not gone unnoticed.
Of all the places Australians expected some of their number to be incarcerated in a military prison, Cuba was not one of them. Guantanamo Bay, leased for US$5000 per annum in perpetuity since 1903 by the USA, housed two Australians, Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks. As a result of the war in Afghanistan, Habib had been taken to Egypt, probably for torture, en route to Cuba, where he suffered many indignities. Habeas corpus was ignored; he was not charged and was released in 2005, probably because of what he would say in court. David Hicks was taken in Afghanistan, having joined a fighting group, and was eventually charged with conspiring to murder. The military tribunals proposed for Cuba had unfortunate legal precedents, such as those in 1942 for the German saboteurs who arrived by submarine in New York (where six of the eight apprehended were put to death) and the conspirators against Lincoln in 1865 (most of whom were summarily executed). Terry Hicks, David’s father, and a growing band of supporters tried to get some justice for his son.
The War on Terror has had a profound effect on Australian society. The bombing of the Bali tourist resort of Kuta in 2002, which killed eighty-eight Australians, and the bomb which exploded near the Australian Embassy in Jakarta added to the fear that such events could happen in Australia. In 2005 the bombings in London by British citizens only increased that fear. The fact that twenty-two people had been killed by political violence in Australia since 1901, compared with more than 170,000 deaths on the roads, did not allay fears. Howard’s anti-terror legislation included the power to hold suspects for fourteen days without charge, and in passing it both the major political parties ignored long-held rules of law such as habeas corpus (enacted in 1679 and dating from the Magna Carta of 1215). The sedition laws were also strengthened, threatening the ability of writers and artists to make political comments and indicating how much Australian opinion had changed since the 1980s. Detention, execution and terror laws were all alien to the Australia of Malcolm Fraser’s prime-ministership.
The case of abortion was an exception to the changes that had been made to the rights of the individual. Strong urging for the government to make abortion more difficult to obtain, if not impossible, came from the fundamentalist wing of the Coalition, supported by the Catholic-educated and seminary-trained Minister for Health, Tony Abbot. Too many female members of parliament were against any change for John Howard to follow his conservative instincts, for one of Howard’s major strengths was to know when not to press his own views too hard.
Since World War II, Australian governments have focused their attention on the immediate region. Primarily, this means selective parts of the Pacific and the immediate north, Indonesia in particular. Following the active military period from 1950 to 1972 in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam, Australia was involved in successful police operations in Cambodia, Timor and the Solomon Islands. The important role Gareth Evans played in bringing peace to Cambodia was followed by Australian peacekeepers arriving in that country in 1992 to supervise elections. When chaos developed in Timor in 1999, the Howard government was instrumental in restoring order with a United Nations mission, without support from the USA. General Peter Cosgrove showed what Australians could do in a challenging situation where the object was to save lives, not take them. When law and order broke down in the Solomon Islands in 2002, a contingent of Australian police were sent and they also behaved with great distinction.
The military, however, was firmly in action outside the immediate area. When Australia joined the United States’ Operation Desert Storm in 1991 to help remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, the Hawke government sent one missile destroyer, one frigate and one supply ship – considerably less than Canada. The USA sent 541,000 men, only to return in 2003 to deal with Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, weapons which Hans Blix, with twenty years’ experience of weapons inspections, had never seen. Increasingly, it was the Prime Minister, and not the Governor General and Commander-in-Chief, who farewelled and greeted Australia’s troops.
As the twentieth century faded, the Anzac legend increased in public importance. Anzac Day celebrations had continued since 1916, fading somewhat in the 60s and 70s, and gaining strength in the 80s. Young Australians travelled in droves to Gallipoli to listen to prime ministers and others telling them how democracy was saved in 1915. The fact that the action took place in order to lend assistance to Britain and her ally, autocratic Tsarist Russia (the terrible face of the 1850s), was not mentioned, nor was the fact that Australia’s imperial forces were protected in the Indian Ocean by the Japanese ship Ibuki.
While the unsuccessful Dardanelles campaign is remembered well, the more successful assault on the western front, and in New Guinea in World War II, are played down. The view in another fifty years will no doubt be different.
The heart of the nation, as Paul Keating saw it, the black part, has not yet been fully accepted by Australian society or government. After being left out of the country’s history until the referendum of 1967, the Aboriginal past and present became part of the history wars. Careful analysis by Henry Reynolds, Lyndal Ryan, Robert Manne and others of the encounter between Australia’s indigenous population and European newcomers came under withering attack from a group led by Keith Windschuttle, and this attack was supported by magazines like Quadrant and sections of Rupert Murdoch’s press. A similar attack was launched on Ronald Wilson’s heartfelt report on the stolen generations.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was set up in 1989 as a national policy-making and service agency for indigenous Australians, but was shut down in 2005 due to alleged misuse of funds. Aboriginal education, health, employment and housing levels remained far below Australian standards, contributing to riots in Redfern in the noughties. The good work done by the football leagues and public broadcasters in promoting indigenous strengths on the playing field has been laudatory: more than 10 per cent of footballers in the AFL are indigenous, compared with a national percentage of around 2 per cent.
Australia’s health system became a hybrid as a result of compromise. The introduction of Medicare by the Hawke government in 1983 meant hospital, specialist and other medical services were available to all, though for most people they came at some cost. Specialists in public hospitals were free, as were most hospital stays, but the varying costs of consultations meant that some visits to the doctor cost more than 15 per cent of a standard fee. A major weakness in the system was the lack of dental coverage, except for some in public hospitals, a service which the Howard government further reduced.
The cost of health has steadily increased over the past few decades, due to rising charges by the profession and the increased use of testing. By 2004 it exceeded 9 per cent of the GDP, compared to 6 per cent in the UK. While doctors were in short supply in some parts of Australia, notably rural and outer-metropolitan areas, more than one thousand practitioners were unable to practise, most of them highly qualified doctors from overseas. Pressure was applied to prevent the number of doctors and dentists trained in Australia from increasing. There had been a laudable decision by universities, instigated by Newcastle and continued by Sydney and the ANU, to have graduate entry for medicine, but there was still no provision for newly trained practitioners to become proficient in more than one language, or knowledgeable about other cultures.
The Howard government was in favour of increasing the number of Australians with private health insurance, partly because of its opposition to Medicare but also in order to reduce demands on the public purse. Following the introduction of a 30 per cent rebate on private health insurance in 1999, the number of Australians insured rose to 46 per cent by September 2000; the figure has subsequently levelled out at about 43 per cent. Family expenditure on health rose from 3.9 per cent in 1984 to 4.7 per cent in 1999, and increased charges by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme will ensure that this figure continues to rise. The coexistence of two systems, private and public, is inimical to wellbeing and perhaps helps explain why life expectation in Australia is lower than in Northern Europe, but considerably higher than in the USA where an extremely costly private health system dominates.
Australia’s education system experienced dramatic changes in the 1980s. The unified national system of higher education introduced by the Dawkins reforms, and the removal of the distinction between universities and Colleges of Advanced Education, led to amalgamations and the creation of new institutions. This was combined with a rapid rise in the retention rate for Year 12, from around 30 per cent in 1985 to more than 75 per cent by 2005; higher-education numbers roughly trebled over the same period. Simultaneously all education became more managerial, with music departments having to put a dollar value on their courses. Labor’s introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme in 1988 ended the period of no university fees. Competition for places in sought-after courses became fierce as the states developed a system of numerically grading all Year 12 students to a ridiculous degree. The Howard government reintroduced the idea of full fees for some courses, something which hadn’t been seen for decades. Education, like health care, became a commodity to be purchased. By 2005 government funding for universities had dropped to 40 per cent, the remainder being made up from fees and contracts. This level of funding was lower than in 1914, when universities were still a state responsibility. Professional courses benefited, while arts and the pure sciences declined. The number of overseas students paying full fees increased dramatically.
Computers became an essential accessory for students, and schools also changed as the world became more technological. All new teachers had a university education, which meant they were older when starting out. Real spending on government schools began to decline in the 80s, while government spending on private education increased. The proportion of students in private schools rose to above 30 per cent, far in excess of the percentage in class-ridden Britain.
Transport suffered in the 1980s, a victim of lack of imagination. The deregulation of the 70s and 80s saw road transport increase dramatically, enormous trucks carrying much of the interstate movement of freight and causing damage to cars, roads and drivers. The relatively idle railways could not compete, their branch lines having been removed. In the 1990s an effort to build a fast train from Sydney to Melbourne fizzled; at around the same time, France successfully developed its high-speed TGV.
Car ownership continued to rise, remaining higher than in comparable countries such as Canada. The soaring price of oil following the invasion of Iraq reduced the use of cars to some extent and also put a dampener on conspicuous consumption. In a triumph for regulation, the road toll fell from a peak of 3,798 in 1970 to 1,737 in 2003, largely due to the wearing of seat belts and stricter enforcement of the law, despite complaints from politicians and the popular press.
The airlines industry also changed considerably in the 80s and 90s. From two domestic carriers (TAA and Ansett), supplemented by small rural companies and one international airline, the industry dwindled to two players: Qantas and Virgin. TAA changed its name to Australian Airlines in 1986 and was taken over by Qantas in 1993. Ansett had entered the international fray in 1987, which was ultimately to be part of its undoing. Fares tumbled and so did the airlines. Newcomers Compass and, later, Impulse went under, as did Ansett in the aftermath of September 11. Qantas was privatised in 1991, as was that other great Labor icon, the Commonwealth Bank.
Australia has experienced large-scale changes to its industrial landscape since the early 1980s. Agriculture, once dominant, fell from 30 per cent of GDP in 1951 to 2.9 per cent in 1982–83. With the abolition of the reserve price for wool and the increased popularity of other fibres, sheep numbers have dropped by more than 40 per cent since 1970. The services sector rose from 38 per cent of GDP in the early 80s to 50 per cent, powered by an explosive growth in property and business services, with finance and insurance almost doubling. Keating’s ‘opening up’ of the economy fuelled these changes, resulting in a dramatic fall in manufacturing, which dropped from 20 per cent of GDP to 11 per cent in twenty years. There were big changes in employment opportunities, with part-time contracts and flexible working hours becoming closer to the norm. There were great financial rewards for the successful, but for others anxiety levels and family stability were adversely affected. Average earnings increased fourfold in the last two decades of the twentieth century, whereas prices rose threefold.
Trade was also reoriented during the period. At the time of Federation, Britain was Australia’s major trading partner, accounting for almost three-fifths of all our trade; by 1981 this had fallen to 5 per cent. By 2004 the major destinations of Australian exports were Japan (18 per cent), the USA (9 per cent) and China (8 per cent), fuelled mainly by big increases in the demand for commodities. The Australia of 1939 would have been astonished by this, as it would have been by imports, which by 2004 had moved from Britain to the USA (16 per cent), Japan (13 per cent) and China (11 per cent).
The driest continent has always provided a challenge. Over tens of thousands of years, Australia’s original inhabitants established harmony with the land, and they respected it. In 1788 the countryside was fairly well supplied with water and had plentiful trees and grasslands. The terrible example of the misuse of land in the Middle East and North Africa was not appreciated by the early settlers, nor were warnings about the greenhouse effect when they were first raised in 1896. However, by the end of the twentieth century there was a developing awareness that the land had been damaged by agriculture, the water supply was decreasing and polluted, and forests were diminishing. Politically this contributed to the rise of the Green movement, support for which increased until the Australian Greens had four senators in 2005, led by Bob Brown, with some influence on a wide range of issues. The Murray-Darling Basin Agreement of 1992 was a tentative response to the deteriorating water situation, and the Howard government saw the need to continue to get consensus with the states to reduce salinity and improve flow. Since 1989 the Landcare movement has done a considerable amount to reduce degradation by planting trees, removing weeds and tackling soil erosion.
The issue of climate change and greenhouse-gas emissions was addressed at an international conference in Kyoto in 1997. Along with the USA, Australia refused to cooperate with reduced-emission targets, seeing the Kyoto Protocol as an attack on energy industries and their economies, especially since the new dynamos of India and China were not obliged to join in. Experts pointed out that Australia could be entirely solar dependent by 2030, and in 2005 Ian Campbell, the Minister for the Environment, was moving towards the increased use of solar power. Concurrently there was talk of constructing desalination plants and loosening the uranium genie, both in terms of storing nuclear waste in the Northern Territory and the possible use of nuclear power in big cities, despite Chernobyl. The debates will doubtless continue into the decades ahead.
Rural life has changed over the past few decades. The staple industries of wool, wheat and beef have remained, but in a diminished form. There was a rise in the number of vineyards in the 80s and 90s, as well as more exotic enterprises such as alpacas, ostriches and olives. The dairy industry was deregulated in 2000, which led to amalgamations and departures from the land. The rural decline caused the closure of banks, shops and schools, and contributed to an increase in suicide rates among rural males. In contrast, since the 60s there has been a steady stream of dissatisfied city dwellers taking their alternative lifestyles to the bush. This led to a decline in the National Party (which until 1982 was called the Country Party) and the ALP doing better beyond the big-city sprawl. A strong rural movement in support of refugees sprang up after the Tampa incident.
The cultural activity of a country can be seen as a measure of its strength. Australia has always been well supplied with cultural venues, and the number of such buildings has grown in recent decades. The Sydney Opera House was considered a monstrosity while under construction but it is now perhaps Australia’s best known feature after Uluru. The Melbourne Arts Centre was developed in the 1980s, becoming a focus for popular festivals as well as quality performances of plays and music. The Adelaide Festival has grown in importance over the years, as have the various writers festivals held around the country. In a variety of ways, government has increasingly supported arts and heritage, to the tune of $5 billion in 2002–03. This figure includes funding for the Australia Council of $126.6 million, an amount which has risen considerably since the council’s inauguration in 1975. Although private funding has also increased over the years, its contribution is small compared to that of government. Funding for the ABC decreased in the 90s and beyond because of a perceived bias, by governments of both persuasion.
No Australian writer has risen to Nobelian heights since Patrick White in 1973. His death in 1990 marked the loss of not just a great novelist but of someone willing to engage in public issues. The South African-born J.M. Coetzee settled in Australia in 2002 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His body of work is enormous, as is that of Peter Carey, who won the Booker Prize in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda, and again in 2001 with The True History of the Kelly Gang. He was followed by Peter Finlay (DBC Pierre), who won the Man Booker Prize in 2003 with Vernon God Little. Multi-prizewinner David Malouf examined his country and its past in Harland’s Half Acre, The Great World and Remembering Babylon; his librettos for Baa Baa Black Sheep and Jane Eyre were also of stunning force. David Williamson continued to write biting comments on contemporary Australia in such plays as Emerald City, Corporate Vibes, Up for Grabs and Birthright. While managing to get closer to the bones of society and the spirit of Patrick White with such plays as No Sugar and Two Brothers, Jack Davis and Hannie Rayson both suffered, in different ways, at the hands of critics and op-ed writers.
Art in its various forms benefited from the growth of galleries. Canberra’s controversial National Gallery became a tourist attraction and its Australian section was strong, as was the case in the various state galleries. Other new galleries opened, including the Ian Potter Centre at Melbourne’s newly created Federation Square. The deaths of Sidney Nolan (1992) and Arthur Boyd (1999) removed links with the 1940s but a thriving culture of contemporary art kept the public interested, particularly the works of Brett Whiteley, Davida Allen and Susan Norrie. Aboriginal art became known worldwide from the 1980s; the work of Rover Thomas and Trevor Nicholls was applauded at the 1990 Venice Biennale, something which, like the contemporaneous release of Nelson Mandela, would have been unthinkable in the 1970s. The creative photography of Ponch Hawkes and William Yang showed Australians to themselves.
Film is a sound source of knowledge about the country for people abroad. Although the quantity of films made in Australia rose and fell with tax concessions and government funding, their quality was more debatable. Fine films were made by Fred Schepisi, Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Paul Cox and Jane Campion in particular, who made Evil Angels, Green Card, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Vincent and The Piano respectively. Excellent actors such as Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Judy Davis have followed similar paths to international success.
Sport became more global, more connected to television and more professional, with more money sloshing around. With the Packer cricket revolution of 1977, top players were paid far more than ever before. This spilled over into other sports, with yearly incomes of at least ten times the average wage common in cricket and the football codes. Interruptions became longer for advertisements, between overs in cricket, after tries in rugby, after each two games in tennis. Television focused on the highlights and ignored other aspects. Cricket’s Sheffield Shield became the Pura Cup and played to crowds of tens rather than the thousands who attended before 1977. The 350,000 who turned up to watch the Melbourne Test of 1937 translates into more than a million today, whereas tests against Zimbabwe or Bangladesh would be lucky to get 30,000. The enormous public interest aroused by the funerals of Don Bradman in 2001 and Keith Miller in 2004 showed the power of the Invincibles’ past glories to tug at the heart.
Soccer went national in the 1970s, with the founding of the National Soccer League in 1976. The NSL was perceived as being made up of clubs based on ethnic groups, and this was associated in the public’s mind with violence. However, crowd violence was nothing new in Australia – it was mainly responsible for North Melbourne’s failure to enter the Victorian Football League (VFL) in 1896. Soccer’s development was retarded by a failure to persuade the best players to play in the national team, but eventually, under the leadership of Frank Lowy, the A-League was formed in 2005, fortuitously coinciding with Australia’s World Cup qualification.
The VFL went national in 1987 with the addition of teams from Perth and Brisbane. During the 90s they were joined by Adelaide, Fremantle and Port Adelaide, and Fitzroy merged with Brisbane to become the Brisbane Lions. Games were played in all states, attracting diminished daily crowds but larger total crowds. Melbourne’s Saturday crowd was frequently smaller than that of 1910. Having lost its local character and facing a serious challenge from soccer, the game looked like sliding into a long-term decline.
The same could have been said for the rugby codes. The Australian Rugby League expanded in 1982 with the addition of Canberra and Illawarra. Other states joined, with mixed success, and Rupert Murdoch launched an ill-fated Super League in order to win exclusive rights for Foxtel. When the competition returned to the ARL alone it was strengthened, but still reduced from its heyday in the 1960s. Internationals were replaced by State of Origin games as the pinnacle of excitement in the public’s mind. Meanwhile Rugby Union became professional and better developed; the World Cup began in 1987 and was won by Australia in 1991. The Super 12 Rugby competition, involving provincial teams from South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, was also a great success, as was the Tri-Nations series with its national sides. A mending of the breach of 1908 between the Rugby codes could well stop the march of soccer.
The Sydney 2000 Olympics was a triumph for the volunteers who made the event take place so smoothly. Overall, the Games left a good feeling, especially after Cathy Freeman’s win in the 400 metres. There were no Cold War boycotts but security was oppressive compared to the free and easy atmosphere of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, where spectators and athletes mingled and journalists walked into the MCG unchallenged. Australian television coverage of the Sydney games was incomplete and interrupted, comparing unfavourably with the best of that from overseas. The change to a more money-obsessed society was evident, with main stadium tickets rising to fifteen times the real cost of those in 1956.
The last two decades of the last century saw dramatic changes in Australia’s media, with ownership of the the print media and television becoming more concentrated. The Keating reforms of 1986 allowed one person to own a chain of TV stations but not a newspaper in the same city as one of those stations, and there was also a restriction on media ownership by non-Australians. Within five years, nineteen metropolitan dailies became twelve. Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited took over Melbourne’s long-established Herald and Weekly Times Group. This led to the closure of the city’s oldest paper, the Herald (established in 1840), which became the Herald Sun in 1990; a similar operation saw the Telegraph-Mirror start up in Sydney in 1990. By 1995 Murdoch had the sole or most popular paper in all capitals (except the West Australian in Perth), along with the only national, The Australian. Fairfax, Murdoch’s sole rival, disintegrated under young Warwick Fairfax, falling to Conrad Black’s Tourang syndicate before being relisted on the stock exchange in 1992.
Television’s three commercial channels also underwent upheavals, with Murdoch and Fairfax forced to sell their stations. Alan Bond bought Channel 9 for more than a billion dollars and sold it back for $200 million, leading Kerry Packer, the owner before and after Bond, to comment, ‘You only get one Alan Bond in a life time.’ Christopher Skase’s efforts with Channel 7 led to the station eventually falling to Kerry Stokes, who is probably the most principled owner of them all. Following the 1987 economic crash, Murdoch sold Channel 10 to Northern Star, who later sold it to CanWest. Pay television was introduced relatively late, in 1995, and was ultimately dominated by Foxtel, partly owned by Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch. The take-up was initially slow but gained momentum when the government watered down the anti-syphoning legislation and removed restrictions limiting major sporting events to free-to-air television. The user-pays principle was supreme.
Both television and cinemas suffered a decline, with videos becoming the more popular means of entertainment. The arrival of DVD technology increased this trend. For much of the time Packer dominated, helped by under-funding at the ABC. Poor programming contributed to the nation’s lack of concentration and decreasing vocabulary.
On Boxing Day 2004 a tsunami struck the Indian Ocean, killing upwards of 250,000 people, principally in Indonesia but also in Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and East Africa. The Australian government initially offered $10 million in assistance, but this figure later rose to $1 billion over five years in grants and loans. The public response was phenomenal in its generosity, with more than $400 million donated to World Vision alone, in a campaign led by the Reverend Tim Costello.
Among those killed were at least twenty-eight Australians, and this, along with the fact that the tsunami occurred in our immediate region, could have been part of the reason for the generous public response. There was very little response to a more a disastrous earthquake in the Himalayas in 2005.
Australia has experienced many natural disasters in recent decades, including the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983, which killed seventy-two; the Newcastle earthquake in 1989, which left thirteen dead; and the Canberra bushfires in 2003, which killed four people and destroyed more than five hundred houses. But the Asian tsunami can be seen as a metaphor for the future. While it could not have been prevented, the death toll could have been greatly reduced had a warning system been in place. A village in India was alerted by a phone warning, its inhabitants thus saved, and the people on an island in the Andaman Sea used natural warnings. The human cost of the tsunami would have been far less if connections had been made to Radio Australia and TV Australia, making it possible to transmit warnings in relevant languages. Increased cooperation will not prevent future tsunamis but it will add to the strength of the human spirit.