After the chronic political instability that marked the conservative collapse and then the feverish pace of the truncated Whitlam regime, the ensuing years present an outward appearance of equilibrium. Between 1975 and 1991 there was just one change of government, and two prime ministers held office for roughly equal terms. Both in their own ways were striving for the security the electorate desired, and both held to the middle ground. Yet in the circumstances that now prevailed there could be no security without upsetting the ingrained habits of the past. One prime minister preferred confrontation and the other consensus as the way to bring change, but the changes they secured were never sufficient. There was always a need to go further, to abandon yet another outmoded practice and make additional improvements. Both leaders employed their considerable personal authority to force the process and both were condemned as soon as they lost office for excessive timidity and insufficient leadership.
Australians were subjected in the closing decades of the last century to an unending pursuit of the constantly receding goal of a competitive edge. Those who directed this quest talked of reform, a process of change that was painful but necessary to bring greater equity and efficiency. Each instalment of reform was followed by another, for the process was never complete. It is not unusual for zealots to explain the failure of their creed by its incomplete adoption, but with their emphasis on doctrinal purity these reformers followed in the spirit of those Protestant theologians who proclaimed of the Reformation that the reformed church is always to be reformed. Their drive to set the country to rights was conducted as a mission of unflagging rectification.
The first of the leaders was Malcolm Fraser, who headed a Liberal–National Country Party coalition from 1975–83. The tall, lean scion of a pastoral dynasty from the Liberal heartland of Victoria, he was educated at private schools and Oxford University. A shy, awkward manner was commonly interpreted as patrician aloofness. The grim determination with which Fraser had pursued power carried over into his exercise of it: he was constantly driving his colleagues, involved in every aspect of policy, impulsive yet deliberate. ‘Life isn’t meant to be easy’ was a provocative pronouncement from one who seemingly inherited the privileges of a ruling class, but it was the genuine credo of a man who drove himself to the limit. Fraser believed that Australians had been coddled into softness and complacency, that they needed to be weaned from dependence on public provision to embrace the stern rigours of competition. Try as he might to reduce government, however, he intervened habitually to right wrongs. A rugged individualism warred with instinctive Tory paternalism.
During the constitutional crisis that culminated with the Dismissal of the Labor government in 1975, the caretaker government organised mass rallies. Malcolm Fraser, leader of the Liberal Party, acknowledges a throng of supporters in Melbourne.
Fraser won elections in 1977 and 1980 over a discredited Labor Party. In 1983 the voters rejected him for a new Labor leader, Bob Hawke. Apart from also studying at Oxford, though as a Rhodes Scholar, Hawke differed from Fraser in almost every respect. One was tall, the other short; one was clipped in speech, the other cultivated a stridently vernacular accent. Fraser was angular, Hawke a conciliator; Fraser prim, Hawke a reformed drinker and womaniser; Fraser exercised power as a duty, Hawke wooed popularity with an almost biblical conviction of personal destiny.
The new prime minister was a child of a Congregational manse who worked for the Australian Council of Trade Unions and in 1970 became its first president to have bypassed the factory floor. Others would follow, but none as skilful in interposing himself between his members and their employers to conjure a settlement of differences. After he entered parliament and laid siege to the leadership, Hawke gave up most of his indulgences. A flash larrikin now appeared in power dress, behind an imposing desk and before a fake bookcase, peevishly insisting on the need for national reconciliation.
Both leaders searched for solutions. There were strategic difficulties abroad, symptoms of domestic strain such as environmental degradation, family breakdown, homelessness and crime. In the absence of older certainties, governments sought to restore national cohesion and purpose. Most of all, they tried to repair an economy that no longer provided reliable growth and regular employment. With the end of the long boom the world economy was dogged by weak, unreliable rates of growth and persistent unemployment. Australia confronted particular problems: its reliance on commodity exports made it increasingly uncompetitive in a global economy dominated by advanced manufacturing and service industries. Its own manufacturing sector was based on import substitution and heavily reliant on tariff protection that left it lagging behind more innovative competitors.
Out of the turmoil in the world economy during the 1970s a new economic order would emerge. It involved the growth of finance markets, liberalisation of trade, an increased mobility of capital and the emergence of new participants as Asian countries embarked on industrialisation. For the advanced economies, this brought a shift from labour-intensive factory production to high-technology manufacturing and service industries. The digital revolution augmented information flows, linked capital markets and allowed supply chains that crossed national boundaries, placing additional pressure on a closed and inward-looking economy.
The needs of business came to dominate national life as never before, and economists claimed an unprecedented authority. Stock exchange indices and currency rates became the staple fare of news bulletins. The vocabulary of the market served as the language of public policy and entered into almost every aspect of social life: the market would promote competition and reward effort; it would discipline and punish any failure to ensure a level playing field. A new orthodoxy arose – neoliberalism – and a distinctive Australian term for it: here it was called economic rationalism. It was remarkable not so much for devotees’ capacity to incorporate almost every form of human behaviour into its syllogisms as for the assumption that there could be no other way of reasoning than by the logic of the market.
***
The Fraser government sought a remedy to the country’s economic difficulties by tackling the problem of inflation. If prices and wage costs could be reduced and profits restored, then a resumption of business activity would follow. Cuts in government expenditure would close the budget deficit, reduce the public sector’s demands on savings and ease interest rates to stimulate increased private investment. Public revenue and expenditure had grown incrementally with the national product for thirty years; now a Cabinet committee was created, which became known as the ‘razor gang’, to slash government programmes and pare back spending.
Inflation did decline, but by 1978 the number of unemployed passed 400,000. At the same time restrictions on foreign investment were lifted to finance an expansion of export industries. Wool gave way to meat and wheat as the chief farm exports, but the largest foreign earnings came from energy and minerals. The rapid increase in the price of energy allowed Australia to become the principal supplier of coal, along with increased sales of oil, gas and uranium. New mines were developed in Western Australia and Queensland for the sale of minerals to Asian markets.
The promotion of Australia as a quarry at a time when the world economy had stalled was a risky strategy. Commodities other than energy made up a declining share of world trade, and their prices continued to fall. The new resource projects created relatively few jobs, not least because they depended upon labour-saving technology, and the effect of the mineral boom on the exchange rate only increased pressure on other industries. As the export growth ended with a new recession in 1982 and drought ravaged the agricultural sector, the government relaxed its tight control over public spending and the monetary supply. Renewed inflation, a breakout of wages and a further jump in unemployment ensured its defeat in the 1983 election.
Labor came to power with an alternative strategy based on its special relationship with the unions. Under the terms of an Accord negotiated with the Australian Council of Trade Unions, workers would forgo wage increases in return for job creation and co-operation would replace conflict in a concerted effort to put Australia back to work. The National Economic Summit held in Canberra within a month of the election legitimated the arrangements in a theatrical break from conventional practice. Opening it, the new prime minister likened the economic crisis to the wartime emergency of 1942, and claimed that it called again for ‘the united efforts of a united people working together to achieve agreed goals and common objectives’. The country’s elected representatives were therefore banished from Parliament House to make room for business and union leaders to pledge their agreement; the unions accepted wage restraint, the employers a return to the system of centralised wage fixation. There were offsets to compensate wage-earners for their forbearance – restoration of public medical insurance and other improvements in the social wage – and there were government programmes to ensure that key industries such as steel and car production remained viable.
As an employment strategy, the Accord worked. One and a half million new jobs were created during the remainder of the decade and the jobless rate fell back from over 10 per cent in 1983 to just over 6 per cent by 1989. But in the search for greater competitiveness the Labor government made other changes. At the end of 1983 it abandoned the defence of the currency and allowed the value of the dollar to be set by the market. Foreign exchange controls were lifted, controls on domestic banks were reduced, and in 1985 foreign banks were licensed to compete with them. If the Accord was the carrot that secured the co-operation of industry for the reconstruction of the Australian economy, financial deregulation was the stick that impelled it forward. Paul Keating, who as Treasurer drove these changes, boasted that ‘We are the first generation of post-war politicians and economic managers to foster a genuinely open Australian economy.’
With financial deregulation, Australia’s economic performance was subjected to the fickle judgement of international currency traders. With the rapid increase of overseas borrowing and a persistent trade deficit, the dollar lost 40 per cent of its value by 1986. By this time the net foreign debt, about half of it public borrowing and half private, represented 30 per cent of the national product, and every new drop in the exchange rate increased its cost. In May 1986 Keating declared that ‘We must let Australians know truthfully, honestly, earnestly, just what sort of international hole Australia is in.’ Without a reduction of costs and an improvement of trade performance, he warned, ‘we will just end up being a third-rate economy … a banana republic’.
The epithet sent shock waves through the country, for it seemed that Australia was in danger of following other white settler societies on the path to ruin. Like them it had built its amenities and advanced living standards on export staples for which there was no longer a reliable demand. Like them it imitated European civilisation, but two economic historians now judged that ‘The modern Australian economy is not really very “European”.’ They saw it rather as a less efficient Canada, importing most of its advanced technology to support a small population that depended for its comfort on the exploitation of natural resources. ‘Of the three classical factors of production, the land was stolen, the capital is borrowed, the labour productivity is low.’
Keating’s banana republic speech prepared his audience for shock therapy: cuts in public spending, further wage restraint, greater exposure of Australian business to international competition. After the earlier financial deregulation came plans for the progressive dismantling of the tariffs that protected local industry and the first talk of relaxing the centralised system of wage fixation. With these further instalments of liberalisation, the essential features that had sustained the Commonwealth since its inception would disappear. The central principle of that original national compact, a strong state to protect living standards, would yield to the operation of the market – and this at the hand of Labor.
The campaign to dismantle the regulatory edifice of the Australian state drew heavily on overseas precedents. After the end of the long boom and the failure of Keynesian techniques of economic management to restore prosperity, there was a general movement to the right. The election of a Conservative government in Britain and a Republican president in the United States at the end of the 1970s heralded an assault on unions, social welfare, and the mixed economy. The apostles of the New Right spoke not of market failure but government failure, not of freedom from insecurity but the freedom of the market as the very foundation of liberty. Their supporters used that designation – the New Right – to distinguish themselves from the older, more pragmatic conservatives.
The ideas of the New Right were taken up in Australia by policy institutes and think tanks, promoted by media commentators, and quickly assimilated into public policy. They appealed to export producers and other enemies of protectionism: a newly formed National Farmers Federation, along with prominent mining magnates, demanded that the crippling burden of tariffs and fixed wages be swept away. They were embraced by opponents of public welfare, who suggested that such assistance merely kept recipients in a state of dependence while sustaining an unproductive bureaucracy. They were used by enemies of the unions, who alleged that the system of arbitration and centralised wage determination fostered an incestuous ‘industrial relations club’. Some employer organisations were at first resistant to the call for its abolition but as Australian business felt the chill wind of international competition, they too embraced labour market deregulation.
Conservative politicians were more wary of the electoral implications of New Right policies: outflanked by Labor’s financial deregulation, they lost an early election in 1984; a populist crusade to install the authoritarian premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, as national leader ruined their chances in 1987. His march on Canberra was a forlorn enterprise, but it forced the leaders of the federal National Party (who had followed his lead and adopted that identity for the Country Party in 1982) to tear up the coalition agreement and support him. Shut out of government, the Liberal Party was already succumbing to chronic instability and would change the leader five times during its exile from office.
Both major parties supported the turn to neoliberalism, as did senior bureaucrats, the press gallery, and other opinion setters. To them it was obvious that the established methods of regulation were not working and had to be dismantled. Ordinary Australians were by no means convinced of the need for such a radical break with the past and their exclusion from decision-making (symbolised by the absence of those without organisational clout from the National Economic Summit) weakened confidence in the political process. Both parties were suffering a long-term decline in membership and loyalty, though Labor’s electoral success allowed its leaders to ride roughshod over that party’s decision-making procedures.
The predicament of the Liberal Party was more deep-seated. The liberalism of the Menzies era, with its unifying symbols of the Crown and British race patriotism, was obsolete. So too the civic virtues that Menzies upheld – individualism accompanied by the acceptance of responsibility, initiative tempered by sobriety and thrift – were challenged by the understanding of human nature associated with neoliberalism – public choice theory – which reconfigured citizens as consumers and saw no interest that was not vested. Labor’s embrace of the market pushed the Liberal Party to the right, so that the sterner ‘dries’ won control of the party at the expense of the ‘wets’, who still believed in government intervention in the national interest.
There was good cause for popular resistance to the neoliberal consensus. Financial deregulation allowed the major Australian banks to relax their prudential limits, and the entry of fifteen foreign banks in 1985, eager to gain a foothold, brought a frenzy of business lending. That, in turn, allowed highly geared speculators to acquire successful companies with debt-financed takeovers and plunder their assets. In this heady phase of wealth acquisition the overseas borrowing that might have gone to investment in research, development and improved productivity went instead into the war chests of corporate buccaneers who tested the limits of business practice. As a financial journalist observed, ‘never before in Australian history had so much money been channelled by so many incompetent to lend it into the hands of so many people incompetent to manage it’. The adventurers created paper empires and built grandiose mansions, acquired private jets and art collections, entertained lavishly and were generous with political donations. The golden age had become a gilded age of rampant excess.
Labor politicians found the freewheeling tycoons far more congenial than the old wealth of the clubs and boardrooms. They admired the entrepreneurial zest of the newcomers and welcomed their acquisition of overseas assets at absurdly overvalued prices as evidence of a more outward-looking Australian business. The surge in credit and asset prices was exacerbated by the decision to allow landlords to deduct interest and other property expenses from their taxable income. Keating had abolished such negative gearing provisions in 1985, describing them as an ‘outrageous rort’ that directed capital away from the productive sector. His restoration of the concession in 1987 brought a 60 per cent increase in house prices over the following two years, which exacerbated inflation.
The government, having removed the instruments to control the economy, could slow it only by repeated increases of the official interest rate, which reached 18 per cent by 1989. It was impossible to bring about a soft landing from such dizzy heights and the recession that followed brought down the high-flying entrepreneurs, along with two State banks, several merchant banks and a number of building societies, while two of the big four banks had to be recapitalised. The damage was not confined to the financial sector as thousands of small businesses went to the wall. ‘This’, the defiant Treasurer insisted, ‘is a recession that Australia had to have’.
Unemployment was again on the rise and passed 11 per cent in 1992. The effort to realign the Australian economy to new patterns of trade and investment had brought improvements in productivity, and the fall in the value of the Australian dollar assisted a growth in the export of agricultural products, manufactures and services, but still left a persistent trade deficit and a large external debt. The debt was private but it was used even less productively than the public foreign debt had been in the 1880s and 1920s. Australia remained dependent on international capital, and vulnerable to cycles of boom and bust. The exposure to market forces yielded not higher but lower growth rates than were achieved during the post-war era when governments regulated the economy, together with greater inequality and greater vulnerability – as was the case with other countries that embarked on neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s.
Australia’s experience of deregulation was moderated, however, by its introduction under a Labor government. Labor combined neoliberal economic policies with a corporatist style of decision-making in an attempt to preserve a social dimension in the operation of the market. The Accord maintained some protection from the consequences experienced in Britain and the United States: there was lower unemployment, a floor under wages, greater assistance to those in need. By conceding the economic arguments of the New Right, Labor still hoped to escape its ruthless repudiation of responsibility for the weak and vulnerable.
Like Margaret Thatcher, Paul Keating insisted that there was no alternative. In 1990 he affirmed the necessity ‘of removing the meddling hands of bureaucracy from the operation of markets’. The choice he offered was stark: Australia could continue ‘to confront the realities of world markets’ or it could ‘retreat to the failed policies of the past’. Globalisation, the catchword for these realities, served both as diagnosis and remedy for the rapid changes that were transforming Australia. They were anticipated by the Australian polymath Barry Jones in his book Sleepers Wake! (1982), which canvassed the country’s future in a post-industrial world with his own prisoner’s dilemma. Australia could adapt to the challenges and opportunities of the information age or it could face a future without work. Jones became the minister for science in the Hawke government; he popularised the appellation the ‘Clever Country’ for the inventive, alert and adaptable Australia he wished to see. But in 1990 Jones was dropped from the ministry.
By this time his dystopian alternative seemed uncomfortably plausible. The occupations that had once provided secure employment were disappearing. The manufacturers of clothing and footwear could no longer compete with cheap imports; white goods were shipped in from low-cost factories in South-East Asia; the city offices that had once been full of typists and clerical workers were refitted with personal computers, designed in Silicon Valley, assembled offshore. Employment in manufacturing fell 17 per cent by the end of the 1980s. Yet the growth of the new high-tech industries that would supposedly take up the slack remained disappointingly fitful. Rather, the service industries were polarised between highly paid jobs and ones that paid low rates and used part-time and casual arrangements to increase flexibility. Employers were no longer prepared to maintain a large permanent workforce. The expectation of a career, of committing oneself to a lifelong vocation that valued experience and allowed workers to retire with dignity, now seemed antediluvian. Among managers and professionals, to remain in the same position for more than a few years was a confession of failure.
There was a similar change in the public sector as the Labor ministry embarked on reforms to make it more responsive to the government’s objectives. Legislation in 1984 scrapped established methods of public administration for private sector procedures that were meant to improve efficiency: corporate planning, programme budgeting, performance evaluation and benchmarking for ‘best practice’. The government subsequently moved to a contractual model of service provision in which companies tendered for the delivery of services and in 1995 a national competition policy required all public agencies – federal, State and local government – to compete on equal terms with the private sector in their business activities.
By then the Commonwealth public service had shed 76,000 employees over a decade. The contractual model, as well as claiming greater efficiency, postulated members of the public as clients or customers who would be offered greater choice by a range of providers – though their capacity to choose the provider or question the quality of the services was limited. The new public management conceived of government as ‘steering rather than rowing’, designing services rather than administering them, and preferring generic management skills to specialist expertise. With the changes in employment conditions and the new emphasis on results, the professionalism, impartiality and ethical standards of the older model of public service were at a discount.
The new order was apparent in the national parliament. When it moved in 1927 from Melbourne to Canberra, the members occupied a temporary building of simple elegance that provided chambers for the Representatives and Senators along with meeting rooms, a library, bar and dining room and a small number of offices. First the prime minister and then other ministers moved their principal office into this building, which had to be extended to accommodate the growing number of parliamentarians and their staff, but all continued to share the principal entrance and mingle with the public in the central hall. The new Parliament House that was opened in 1988 dispensed with such accessibility by separating the public section from that of the members, and locating a separate ministerial wing symbolically in the centre of a vast edifice. Occupying 32 hectares and containing more than 4500 rooms, it took seven years to build and was the largest construction project since the Snowy Mountains Scheme. From their opulent bunker the ministers of state, together with a large retinue of advisers, conducted the country’s affairs.
Government enterprises, meanwhile, were required to corporatise their operations and maximise commercial outcomes. From 1991 the Commonwealth began the sale of large undertakings, including the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas, and States began selling utilities such as water, gas and electricity, along with their transport, banks and insurance operations. Since the proceeds were generally used to reduce public sector debt but the income stream was no longer available to government, some privatisations increased the net worth of the public sector and others reduced it. The experience of consumers was also mixed. Executive salaries, share options and other incentives enriched the managers of these enterprises, but many of them achieved their bonuses by cutting costs and shedding labour.
The chief burden of the changes fell on those least able to carry it. The loss of process work particularly affected middle-aged migrant men and women who had settled close to the factories in the principal cities. The decline of heavy industry struck industrial centres such as Newcastle and Wollongong in New South Wales, Whyalla and Elizabeth in South Australia. The closure of processing plants in smaller towns placed further strain on rural dwellers, who saw schools, hospitals, shops and banks close as farming populations declined. Large companies that once cross-subsidised their less profitable operations abandoned them, while public agencies that accepted a service obligation no longer provided that service. The reconfiguration of staffing practices that combed out the less skilled and replaced permanent full-time employees with part-time and casual ones bore particularly on the young. With fewer jobs for school-leavers, the rate of youth unemployment was persistently high.
Workforce participation increased during the 1980s: a movement of women into paid employment, which had gathered force in the 1960s and 1970s, was assisted by the growth of part-time employment. The discriminatory practices associated with the protection of the male breadwinner were disappearing, yet many families now found that two incomes were needed to make ends meet while the pressures on family life were increasing. Particularly vulnerable to poverty were families consisting of a single parent with dependent children. Between 1974 and 1987 the number of these families doubled to comprise one in six of all families.
The Hawke government was uncomfortable with its inability to restore full employment or stem the clear signs of distress; the prime minister’s rash election promise in 1987 that ‘by 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty’ came back to haunt him. Labor maintained a commitment to social welfare but directed assistance far more closely to those in need with stringent asset and income tests on most benefits. The primary emphasis was on job creation and training, which brought a rapid increase of school retention rates and corresponding expansion of post-secondary education. This in turn was aligned more closely with vocational outcomes through changes in the school curriculum that redefined education as training.
The government took longer to extend its reform project to higher education. There had been a rapid expansion of universities in the post-war years, when the Commonwealth government assumed financial responsibility for the sector. With more school-leavers seeking to continue their studies and a growing demand for professional expertise, enrolments increased ninefold between 1955 and 1975. Universities were not spared the cuts in public expenditure that ensued, and doubts were raised about their overly academic orientation, but no one seemed to know what to do with them. For more than a decade they stagnated.
Then in 1987 a new minister took charge: John Dawkins, who had previously initiated the public sector reforms, headed an enlarged Department of Employment, Education and Training. At breakneck speed, Dawkins raised teachers’ colleges and other training institutions to university status in an enlarged Unified National System. To restore growth he introduced a student charge that was paid after graduation on an income-contingent basis. He set in train a process of mergers that created large, multi-campus universities; imposed greater accountability through new funding arrangements; required universities to replace older collegial practices with line management; and expected them to reorient their teaching and research to the task of rebuilding international competitiveness.
All of this was accompanied by scathing criticism of academics as pampered and privileged, and universities as unworldly, ‘ossified bodies incapable of adaptation’. Dawkins disdained consultation with the vice-chancellors and was scornful of their resistance. ‘The universities are very, very cross’, warned the head of their national body, ‘and if they think we’re a mob of wimps, they’d better have another think’. In fact the vice-chancellors were readily reconciled to their enhanced authority, opportunities and rewards – one complaisant university council was even happy to provide a new residence, limousine and chauffer, baulking only at the request for a helicopter and pilot to facilitate visits to the outlying provinces.
The chief casualty of the new order was the pursuit of equality. For thirty years after 1945, social-democratic governments had sought to reduce the inequalities of income and wealth generated by the capitalist market while workers took advantage of full employment to improve their lot. That endeavour broke down with the end of the long boom so that the 1980s brought increased polarisation of the rich and poor around the world. Australia, with its residual system of public welfare, continued to ease the plight of the vulnerable. While it spent less, more of what it spent went to the needy. But this limited redistribution to the needy failed utterly to curb the growing inequality at the other end of the income scale.
With wages pegged, the profit share increased. The rich became richer. They paid themselves higher executive salaries, and realised windfall gains on property and financial markets. They also became less willing to share their bounty, using tax shelters to minimise their contribution to public revenue, and more ostentatious in flaunting it. Deregulation removed not just the institutional framework that bound individuals into relations of mutual obligation but the sentiments that sustained social solidarity. A meanness of spirit was apparent in the periodic vilification of the victims of unemployment as work-shy ‘dole bludgers’. The weakening of mutuality, the rampant individuality that spurned the virtues of love, duty and sacrifice, allowed a cult of selfishness to flourish.
The 1980s were punctuated by political scandals that eroded confidence in government. In Queensland, where Bjelke-Petersen was a law unto himself, graft and corruption went unchecked until his failed bid for national office brought him undone. A commission of inquiry spent almost two years uncovering the systematic abuse of office. The premier escaped due to ill health, and his particularly venal deputy died before charges could be laid, but three ministers and the police commissioner were convicted and gaoled. Brian Burke, the Labor premier of Western Australia from 1983 to 1988, established such close links with entrepreneurs that that the State became known as in the media as WA Inc. He resigned as the deals turned sour following the stock exchange crash of 1987 but was called back from his post as Ambassador to Ireland and the Holy See in 1992 to appear before a royal commission, which found that leading businessmen had made substantial contributions to party funds under his control. Burke and his deputy both served gaol terms. In New South Wales special deals for mates were a way of life and embroiled the chief magistrate, the minister for prisons and even a High Court judge.
Australia was marked by a high concentration of media ownership, and it increased during the 1980s as all three of the commercial television networks changed hands. Alan Bond paid the largest price, $1 billion, to Kerry Packer for Channel 9 in 1987, who then bought a controlling share for $200 million three years later; ‘you only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime’, Packer remarked. With his acquisition in 1987 of the newspaper chain once controlled by his father, Rupert Murdoch controlled the majority of the country’s metropolitan dailies. These media moguls were the two richest Australians by the end of the 1980s (though Murdoch was an absentee owner who took out American citizenship as a condition of his expansion there), and it was a rash politician who defied them. When the Hawke government was determining new rules on media ownership, a member of the Cabinet asked the prime minister, ‘Why don’t you just tell us what your mates want?’ The role of the media was supposedly to invigilate the actions of government so that citizens could hold their elected representatives to account. Now media tycoons had a direct interest in government policy across the full range of their business interests.
Sport itself became a form of big business. In 1977 Kerry Packer’s television network bought the services of the country’s leading cricketers, put them into coloured clothing and reworked a leisurely game into a frenetic performance. Other sporting codes succumbed afterwards to the same commercial pressures, forming national competitions for a national audience. Games provided media product, clubs became corporations, sporting heroes turned into celebrities. The distinction between the amateur and the professional had once affirmed a preference for the voluntary participant over the mercenary, enjoyment over reward. Professionalism was now synonymous with success, and sporting idols became prey to allegations of drug enhancement, match-fixing and sexual misconduct.
Alan Bond was the most audacious of the corporate pirates who flourished in the 1980s. An English migrant, he began working life as a signwriter in Perth, moved into property development and achieved celebrity in 1983 when he financed the syndicate that won the America’s Cup, thus ending more than a century of American supremacy. The Australian team yacht sported a boxing kangaroo and took as its anthem a boastful pop-song inspired by The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. Upon their return from this triumph, Bond and his wife were accorded a parade through the main streets of Perth, lined with cheering crowds. ‘These people are our royalty’, one local remarked.
In preparation for the defence of the America’s Cup four years later, there was substantial redevelopment of the port city of Fremantle. So too the waterfronts of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane were turned into places of pleasure. Darling Harbour, alongside the central business district of Sydney, was upgraded first, in the mid-1980s. A historian noted how hotels and bars, cinemas and a fun park, a shopping precinct and a casino, ‘every modern commercial cliché’, were crammed around the foreshores of what had been a vital artery of the city’s older trading economy. Soon an enormous casino rose up along the south bank of the Yarra River in Melbourne, a city that had steadfastly resisted gambling venues.
Bob Hawke basked in the success of Alan Bond’s yacht, which won the America’s Cup in the same year he came to office.
Bond’s defence of the America’s Cup in 1987 proved unsuccessful, and the stock market crash in that year left him overexposed, so that by 1990 receivers were picking over the wreckage in an effort to track down shareholders’ assets. Bond himself was gaoled, unlike some other entrepreneurs who fled overseas, but in 1989, as the financial journalists who had puffed up his business acumen began to question his solvency, he spoke defiantly at the National Gallery where part of his art collection was on display. He had an affinity, he said, with the French impressionist painters who were bold and creative men subjected to ‘criticism and mockery’. They too had been victims of that impulse to cut down tall poppies, which continued unabated in his own country.
As he appropriated the paintings, so he embezzled the phrase. Egalitarian Australians had once used the term ‘tall poppies’ to decry those who got above themselves, and such healthy irreverence was celebrated as a national virtue. Then, in the last year of the Whitlam government when the impulse for greater equality was faltering, a senior Liberal sounded a new note: ‘tall poppies, more and more tall poppies, are what this country needs’. By the 1980s the term had lost all pejorative connotations. Tall poppies were now national treasures, celebrated in lavish encomia across almost every field of endeavour – a tribute to successful Australian women appeared in 1984 as Tall Poppies. As inequalities of prestige, wealth and power were a necessary correlate of enterprise and achievement, so Australians were urged to cast off their unseemly modesty in order to achieve. Knocking had become a vice in a country that had forgotten that ‘achieve’ is a transitive verb.
During the 1980s, then, Australia dismantled most of the national institutions that had provided a small, trading economy with a measure of protection from vulnerability to external shocks. Few lamented their demise. Critics blamed them for entrenching sectional interests, sheltering inefficiency and stifling initiative. Most of all, they argued that protection was simply unsustainable because globalisation was sweeping away the capacity of national governments to resist market forces. Some in the Labor government wanted to graft a reform process onto egalitarian traditions and maintain a capacity to protect living standards. That aspiration weakened as deregulation proceeded and the capacity to control its effects diminished. By the end of the decade Australia had cut itself loose from the past and was drifting on the choppy waters of the global market, more exposed, more vulnerable.
***
The turn to the right in domestic politics coincided with a revival of the international Cold War. In the United States, after the country’s defeat in Vietnam, partial détente with the Soviet Union and a reduction of military expenditure, a series of humiliating reversals in the late 1970s brought a new president, Ronald Reagan, and a fresh determination to confront the communist Evil Empire. With the encouragement of Margaret Thatcher, the United States resumed the arms race. Australia was an early and vociferous supporter of the second Cold War. Malcolm Fraser warned repeatedly against the Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean; he encouraged the expansion of American communication facilities in Australia and responded to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan with an attempt to prevent Australian participation in the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Fraser therefore welcomed the advent of Reagan and supported the reassertion of American strength. His relations with Thatcher were much cooler, partly because of arguments within Commonwealth forums over the white supremacist regimes of southern Africa. He was a courageous critic of apartheid, and human rights became an important element of his foreign policy. There was also a strong regional element. Fraser saw China as an ally against the Soviet Union. He visited Beijing before Washington, supported China’s 1979 invasion of Vietnam, and encouraged a loose coalition of China and Japan with the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to contain the Soviet threat. This in turn guided Australia’s closer relations with ASEAN as the principal regional forum, and highlighted the problematic relationship with Indonesia.
Australia’s nearest and most populous neighbour had emerged in the second half of the twentieth century as its most proximate threat. Under the presidency of the aggressively anti-imperial Achmad Sukarno, Indonesia’s incorporation of the western half of New Guinea in 1962 and then its confrontation with the Malaysian confederation in 1963 aroused fears of further anti-Western belligerence. The suppression by General Suharto in 1965 of the Indonesian Communist Party in an action that slaughtered hundreds of thousands eased that anxiety, but Suharto’s corrupt and authoritarian regime proved no less assertive. In 1975 it invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, and in the following years brutally repressed local resistance both there and in its province of New Guinea. The Whitlam and Fraser governments acceded abjectly to these acts of aggression. The Hawke government continued to extenuate them as it negotiated with Indonesia for a division of the rich oil deposits that lay under the bed of the Timor Sea.
The primacy of the economy reshaped foreign as well as domestic policy: in 1987 the Departments of Foreign Affairs and Trade were amalgamated. Trade patterns increased the regional orientation as the balance of world economic power shifted towards the Pacific: by 1984 the volume of trans-Pacific trade exceeded that of trans-Atlantic trade. While European economies stagnated in the 1980s, those of Japan and the ‘four tigers’ – South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore – achieved rapid growth. Indonesia and Malaysia followed on the same path of industrial development, and China cast off the shackles of its command economy and rumbled into motion.
Australia increased trade with Asia (which took half of Australia’s exports and provided half of its imports by the end of the 1980s), but the Australian market share was falling. With European and North American trading blocs pressing for greater access to Asian markets, there was a grave danger that Australia would be excluded. Shut out of Asia, it would see the newly industrialised countries of the region surpass its living standards, leaving Australians as the ‘poor white trash’ of the South Pacific. The government showed ingenuity in establishing the Cairns group of agricultural producers in preparation for a new round of international trade negotiations in 1986, but it proved far more difficult to make the United States comply with free trade in agriculture. Closer economic ties with New Zealand followed an agreement in 1983.
The desire to fashion an independent role saw Australian initiatives both in the region and beyond it. The foreign minister after 1987, Gareth Evans, was as active in international forums as Evatt, his predecessor forty years earlier. He promoted a settlement in Cambodia, sent peace-keeping forces there and to other local conflicts, pushed for nuclear disarmament and generally played the reforming role of an international good citizen. Defence policy shifted to a regional orientation, and foreign policy invoked the idea of Australia as a ‘middle power’ that could join in coalitions and exert influence in international forums – in these areas of national endeavour, as in others, the phrase ‘punching above its weight’ quickly became a national cliché. The aspiration was always constrained by the Hawke government’s absolute commitment to the Western alliance, which in the last phase of the Cold War meant support of the United States as it exerted its augmented dominance. The American communication bases in Australia, more important than ever for a new generation of strategic weapons, were therefore sacred. The right of American warships to enter local ports, regardless of whether they were carrying nuclear weapons, was inviolable.
When the New Zealand Labour government refused to allow such visits in 1986 and the Reagan administration suspended its obligations under ANZUS to the impudent outpost, Australia stuck firmly with its more powerful ally. ANZUS remained vital, not as a guarantee of Australian security (for it had been made clear during the Timor crisis that Indonesia was more important to the United States than Australia) but because it provided membership of the western alliance and thus afforded access to American technology and intelligence. Such were the burdens of a middle power.
Then, at the end of the 1980s, the second Cold War ended in communist collapse. The Soviet economy, with its emphasis on heavy industry, was unable to adapt to the challenge of the new information industries. The need to divert increasing resources from an ailing economy to match the increased military expenditure of the United States squeezed the living standards of its people, who were no longer sustained by faith nor as easily cowed into submission. The rigid system of centralised control, the imposition of conformity to a bankrupt ideology, the endemic corruption and cynicism, ended in a chain reaction of peaceful revolutions in eastern Europe and the overthrow of Gorbachev by Yeltsin in Russia. The great twentieth-century contest between capitalism and socialism was over. Socialism was vanquished, and not just the dead-end command socialism of the communist countries but the more moderate collectivism pursued by labour movements in the West.
***
With that triumph came renewed declarations of an end of ideology, even the end of history. As this claim was made, however, there was a sharpening of ideological differences in Australian politics. The coalition parties, which lost a further election in 1990, turned to a bone-dry economist, John Hewson, who quickly developed a thoroughgoing New Right policy that included a regressive tax system, further reduction of the public sector, speedier removal of tariff protection and labour market deregulation. Bob Hawke had lost interest in pursuing further change; the very occupation of office exhausted his energies, and he was overthrown at the end of 1991 by Keating.
While the prime minister had orchestrated the national consensus, it was the treasurer who drove the far-reaching reforms of the 1980s. In his impatience for change, sartorial tastes and passion for French antique clocks, if not in his savage polemics, Paul Keating was an unlikely product of Australia’s nearest equivalent to Tammany Hall: the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party. He was born in a working-class suburb of Sydney, the son of a boilermaker, and left school at the age of fifteen to pursue a political apprenticeship in the Labor machine; a friendship with the aged warhorse Jack Lang deepened his appreciation of Labor’s tribal traditions. Keating secured election to parliament in 1969 at the age of twenty-five, and his factional seniority ensured him the treasurer’s post in 1983. He was a quick learner who rapidly mastered his Treasury briefings and soon went beyond them; one of his first announcements was that his predecessor in the former Fraser government had concealed the size of the budget deficit.
This was John Howard, five years older, who had grown up in a modestly comfortable neighbourhood just a few kilometres distant from Keating and pursued a similar path through the Liberal Party that brought him also to Canberra five years after the Labor prodigy. Howard made up for lost time and was dubbed the ‘boy treasurer’ when promoted by Fraser to the post in 1977. The son of a service-station owner, he too sat at the feet of party elders and absorbed their antipathy to trade unions and preference for free enterprise. He wanted to reduce the role of government but could not see how to do so without treading on the toes of business and in any case deferred to Fraser in framing the pre-election budget. As leader of the opposition from 1985 he moved closer to the New Right, but the Liberal and National Parties remained divided over deregulation, and Howard’s ill-judged conservatism on social issues contributed to his loss of the leadership in 1989. An intense, awkward man, his dogged pursuit of the ultimate prize seemed to have failed. Many wrote him off; Keating didn’t.
The new prime minister feared that he too had been kept waiting too long. The sharp recession threatened an electoral backlash that would allow the Coalition to reap the benefits of the changes he had implemented. The international economy was entering a period of sustained prosperity. With inflation finally tamed, fiscal policy under control, a free exchange rate and reduced protection, Australian producers were poised to benefit from strong demand. Keating pressed ahead after 1991 with further instalments of reform, including the strengthening of competition laws, the relaxation of centralised wage fixation and the introduction of a universal system of superannuation.
At the same time Keating used the opportunities of his prime ministerial office, and the spectre of Hewson’s more doctrinaire embrace of the New Right, to reinvent himself. He was no longer the combative economic rationalist, now he was the competent manager who appreciated that government had a larger responsibility. ‘When Australia opted for an open economy’, he maintained, ‘the nation committed itself to succeed in an endless race’, but the capacity to endure relentless change depended on the resilience of what Keating now recognised as the ‘social fabric’. Those countries that would prosper were ‘social democracies where government is involved in making the societies tick, where there is a happy mix between efficient economics and a comprehensive social policy in this post-monetarist, post-communist era’. In marking these discontinuities Keating increasingly cast back to national traditions of fortitude and achievement; he invoked the instinctive loyalty of the labour movement to vouchsafe his concern for the underdog. ‘This was a victory for the true believers’, he proclaimed when he defeated Hewson in the 1993 election.
He cast back in order to look forward. As the collapse of old industries ate into Labor’s working-class constituency, as the membership and the capacity of the unions declined, the Labor Party was increasingly dependent on a coalition of social movements. Multiculturalism, environmentalism and the Aboriginal movement became vital to the electoral fortunes of the government.
When Labor took office in 1983 it was by means apparent it would forge a close relationship with migrant communities. Whitlam had championed multiculturalism, but he also cut the migrant intake and was unsympathetic to refugees. Fraser, on the other hand, oversaw an expansion of new arrivals and extended multicultural services. Moreover, he welcomed refugees who fled Vietnam following the fall of Saigon in 1975 against charges by Bob Hawke, then president the Australian Council of Trade Unions, that they were jumping the immigration queue. The Vietnamese settlers, 150,000 of them by 1983, were part of a substantial realignment of migrant policy that saw the Asian intake increase to 38 per cent of all settlers in that year.
The Hawke government maintained the same policy as part of its endeavour to develop closer ties with Asia, and defended it when the historian Geoffrey Blainey claimed in 1984 that the level of Asian immigration was straining public acceptance. Stung by accusations of racism, Blainey responded with his own allegation that the government was arrogant and insensitive to the feelings of ordinary Australians who were uncomfortable with the invasion of their suburbs, and soon he was warning of race riots. His further claim that multiculturalism had become ‘rabid’ and ‘divisive’ opened a divide with other ethnic groups. At first the Liberal Party maintained bipartisan support for multiculturalism, but in 1988, when Blainey repeated his warning that it was turning Australia into ‘a cluster of tribes’, he found support from John Howard, who as leader of the opposition suggested the influx of Asian immigrants should be slowed to preserve social cohesion.
That Labor should develop such a close relationship with the environmental movement was even more unlikely. The movement emerged from the late 1960s in campaigns to protect wilderness sites from being swallowed up by development projects such as mining, logging and damming – projects that provided jobs for union members. It had extended into the cities as young professionals mobilised to protect their inner-city neighbourhoods from redevelopment, and it found an ally in New South Wales from the Builders Labourers Federation, which assisted a group of women in the fashionable Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill to save the last remaining piece of open land in that area. But the Builders Labourers Federation was led by communists, and Keating was a product of the brutally pragmatic school of right-wing Labor politics who in 1981 derided the left as standing for ‘wider nature strips, more trees and let’s go back to making wicker baskets in Balmain’.
The end of the long boom coincided with an enhanced appreciation of the costs of development as the great triumphs of the post-war period turned out to be illusory. The Snowy Mountains Authority had turned back the rivers from the southeast coast to water the inland plains, and poisoned the soil with salt; the Ord River on the northwest coast had been dammed for irrigation, but infestations of insects killed most of the crops. The government’s scientific organisation waged biological warfare against the rabbit, but the survivors returned to compete for pasture. A loss of confidence in the capacity to direct economic growth was accompanied by similar doubts about the ability of science to control nature.
A campaign to save a Tasmanian river system of great natural beauty from a proposed project to generate hydro-electricity became the turning-point. Protestors occupied the Franklin dam site in 1982 and Labor undertook during the federal election of 1983 to prevent its construction, a promise kept by the passage of legislation to confer World Heritage status on the region. The same method was used subsequently to protect the Daintree rainforest in northern Queensland and other wilderness areas. As membership of environmental groups grew to dwarf that of the Labor Party, Graham Richardson, the numbers man for the New South Wales right, took the environment portfolio and emerged as a fervent conservationist. His green strategy secured the support of the Australian Conservation Foundation and the preference votes of smaller parties that brought Labor victory in the 1990 election.
The course of Aboriginal policy proved more tortuous. Malcolm Fraser found racial discrimination as repugnant as Gough Whitlam had, and the 1975 legislation that prohibited it used the Commonwealth’s external affairs power to override any inconsistent State measure. Fraser’s enactment in the following year of the Northern Territory land rights legislation initiated by Gough Whitlam, along with his creation of an Aboriginal Development Commission to fund land purchase, housing development and Indigenous enterprises, suggested a bipartisan consensus in favour of Aboriginal self-determination. The difficulty in this liberal consensus was that legal equality stood alongside land rights legislation that posited Indigenous Australians as a people with special needs and entitlements.
Indigenous numbers were growing – from 156,000 in 1976 to 352,000 by 1996 – in part because more Australians identified themselves as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Some were assisted to do so when an upsurge of interest in Aboriginal history increased knowledge of the Stolen Generations; others needed no prompting and shared their life stories in a stream of publications. Sally Morgan, an artist and writer who had grown up in suburban Perth, related a journey from childhood silence and evasion to recovery of family links that culminated in a return to My Place (1987). Her book became a bestseller that reworked a stigma into a celebration: ‘What had begun as a tentative search for knowledge had grown into a spiritual and emotional pilgrimage. We had an Aboriginal consciousness now and were proud of it.’
Such proclamation of Aboriginal identity was accompanied by a cultural renaissance in music, cinema, theatre, dance, art and literature that reached a wide commercial audience. Aboriginal artists in Central Australia used acrylic paints to put traditional knowledge onto boards and canvas, and others revived the use of bark in art and craft. Among the most powerful voices were those of Jack Davis, the playwright; Jimmy Chi, the composer of Bran Nue Day (1990); and Ruby Langford Ginibi, who wrote Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988). Yothu Yindi, an Aboriginal band from Arnhem Land, found an international audience for songs both in English and their own language. Indigenous Australians created powerful symbols. The Aboriginal flag, a striking arrangement of black, gold and ochre, was one of them. It became increasingly common in the 1990s for public meetings to begin with an Aboriginal elder giving a ‘welcome to country’ and a non-Aboriginal Australian to respond with an acknowledgement of the original inhabitants of the country on which they were meeting. There was a revival of Aboriginal languages, a return to Aboriginal names.
The adoption of Aboriginal decoration by Qantas, the Australian airline, attested to popular acceptance of indigeneity as a distinctive national marker.
Despite this growing popular interest and sympathy, it proved difficult to overcome the entrenched disadvantages of Indigenous Australians. They had lower income levels than the rest of the population and higher rates of ill health and mortality. More of them were arrested and imprisoned. A royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody was just one of the initiatives taken at this time in an effort to remedy these inequalities.
The pursuit of self-determination proved more contentious. There was government support for a range of national, regional and local Indigenous organisations that provided employment and delivered services, but such self-management ran up against government expectations of accountability for the public funds spent on the Indigenous sector. Charlie Perkins, a former footballer and organiser of the 1965 Freedom Ride who became the first Aboriginal secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, had to walk ‘with one foot on either side of a barbed wire fence’. The campaign for land rights clashed with the rapid expansion of mining in northern Australia. In 1980 the Western Australian premier Charles Court sent a large police escort to accompany a road convoy of drilling rigs on a journey of 2500 kilometres to a pastoral station, Noonkanbah, to drill for oil over the objections of the Yungngora community to the disturbance of their sacred sites. In Queensland Bjelke-Petersen maintained an obdurate resistance to land rights and even abolished Aboriginal reserves: ‘We don’t want them set aside in some country that becomes black man’s country’, he explained.
After Fraser refused to override these actions, the Labor Party undertook during the 1983 election to legislate for national land rights. In preparing to do so it encountered fierce opposition from Western Australia to the proposal that these rights should include a veto on mining. The mining industry embarked on a publicity campaign to discredit Aboriginal entitlement; one executive even claimed that capitalism and mining were ‘part of the divine order’, though he threatened the churches with legal action for their criticism of the industry. The government’s capitulation to this campaign led to condemnation from Aboriginal people and then abandonment of the measure.
The prospect of Aboriginal protest disrupting the Bicentenary of white settlement in 1988 caused Hawke to propose a new approach through a compact or even a treaty, and in June of that year he gave an undertaking to Indigenous leaders at the Barunga cultural festival in central Australia to begin work on such an agreement. It too encountered resistance, so that in 1991 the government established a Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation to work towards an agreement by the end of the century. The replacement in 1989 of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the Aboriginal Development Commission by a new and elective Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission also raised hopes only to dash them. While this met a longstanding desire for a representative body, it remained under ministerial control and supervision by white administrators.
It was the High Court that broke the impasse. In June 1992 it ruled in favour of a claim brought by Eddie Mabo seeking native title for his people of the Mer islands in the Torres Strait. In doing so the court rejected the doctrine of terra nullius. It found that native title was not extinguished with the establishment of British sovereignty over Australia and that it continued to operate unless valid title had been granted over Crown land. The language the judges used to describe the consequences of British settlement – ‘the conflagration of oppression and conflict’ that ‘spread across the continent to dispossess, degrade and devastate the Aboriginal people and leave a legacy of unutterable shame’ – challenged Australians. Since the decision required legislative clarification of how far native title ran, and how it might be claimed and exercised, it also presented the government with an explosive issue as it prepared for the 1993 election.
Keating accepted the challenge. ‘Mabo was the hand history dealt me, and I was never going to walk away from it’, he stated later. State and territory governments demanded the Commonwealth reduce their exposure to native title claims; Indigenous leaders, who came together at Ern Valley in the Northern Territory in the largest such assembly in Australian history, insisted that their rights be upheld. The campaign waged by mining and pastoral interests was vitriolic, with claims that ordinary Australians would lose their homes, and the coalition parties fanned such fears. After long and difficult negotiation, legislation validated the extinguishment of native title on areas in dispute, set up a Native Title Tribunal for establishing it elsewhere, and created a land corporation to buy land for the descendants of those who would be able to make such claims.
The Mabo judgement gave rise to Keating’s most celebrated speech, delivered late in 1992 before an Aboriginal audience in the inner-Sydney suburb of Redfern. The crowd was sceptical, the prime minister initially speaking over catcalls. But when he proceeded to the frank declaration of responsibility quoted in chapter 1, those present fell silent:
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 practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and prejudice.
With each of these statements, the applause grew louder. In acknowledging the responsibility of ‘non-Aboriginal Australians’ for the plight of the Indigenous population, the prime minister also reminded them that Australia had ‘reached out to us’. It had taken in the poor of Britain, provided a new start for the dispossessed Irish, given shelter from war and persecution in Europe and Asia. If it was possible to build ‘a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians’.
This was just one of the speeches delivered by Keating that attained an eloquence rare in Australian public life. Assisted by his speechwriter, Don Watson, a historian with the gift of whimsy to complement the prime minister’s earthy vernacular, they renewed national legends by enlarging them. His frequent evocations of sacrifice in overseas wars were more controversial; they affirmed national heroism at the expense of imperial folly to serve his call for a final break with Britain through the reconstitution of Australia as a republic. The republican cause, in turn, served to differentiate the forward-looking Labor Party from the backward-looking Liberals, to engage the creative energies of the cultural sector and to use the diversity of a multicultural society as a national strength.
Keating’s nationalism was expansive. He wanted to make Australia ‘competitive, outward looking, phobia-free’, to equip Australians with the confidence to operate in the globalised economy and attach them to their Asian destiny. A major achievement was to expand the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group into a major regional forum. It had been established by his predecessor in 1989 as an opportunity for economic ministers to meet, but Keating converted it into a regular gathering of national leaders and persuaded President Clinton that the United States should become a member. Engagement with Asia was a recurrent theme of his leadership – he even suggested that mateship could be understood as an Asian value.
Some Asian leaders were not so sure. Indonesia’s rulers found criticism by the Australian press a sign of disrespect, the preoccupation with human rights an indication that the white outpost was still wedded to Western values. Australia was denied membership of ASEAN, the other major regional forum, and opposed by Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir, in its attempt to promote APEC as a broader regional bloc. Keating’s frustrated description of his counterpart as recalcitrant did not assist his cause.
***
After his electoral victory in 1993 Keating became more preoccupied with his ‘big picture’, more petulant with commentators who suggested that he was no longer attentive to economic reform. The Liberal Party, meanwhile, had turned back to its former leader, John Howard. This time he avoided the hectoring stridency that had brought him undone in the 1980s and learned from the forthright naivety of Hewson, who had helpfully laid out a comprehensive New Right programme for Keating to demonstrate its unpalatable implications. Capitalising on the growing dissatisfaction of electors with a tired government, Howard offered as small a target as possible.
He took advantage also of the cumulative results of a difficult economic transition, and especially its divisive effects on incomes. Between 1982 and 1994 the top 10 per cent of income earners enjoyed an increase of $100 a week, and the bottom 10 per cent (assisted by Labor’s welfare spending) gained $11 a week, but many of those in between struggled. It was to this amorphous statistical construct that the coalition parties had appealed with the equally fuzzy appellation of ‘Middle Australia’. This was a far cry from Menzies’ forgotten people: he had divined that expressive term in a substantial renovation of the conservative tradition; the geographically implausible Middle Australia was suggested by a firm of consultants.
During his first period as Liberal leader in the 1980s, Howard had issued a policy document with a cover picture that showed an idealised family – the husband in a suit, a decorous wife and two neat, clean children – standing in front of their substantial dwelling with its leafy front garden and white picket fence. The image of suburban security harked back to the way that Menzies had made the family the consensual symbol of domestic life, but by the 1980s only one in five households consisted of a male breadwinner with a full-time housewife and children. Howard’s clumsy evocation ignored the homes that now consisted of partners who both pursued careers but might not be married; it excluded the gay couples, single parents and parents still supporting children of working age, and the blended families with children from earlier marriages. Keating mocked Howard as a man living in the past, wanting to take Australia back to the stifling conformity of the 1950s.
Many Australians, however, did not share the prime minister’s views on the merits of change. These included the victims of economic reform, for Labor’s emphasis on growth did not dent the structural unemployment that persisted in older industrial regions, and the severe recession at the beginning of the 1990s undid much of its job creation. This recession, moreover, was caused by the government’s reliance on interest rates in a largely deregulated financial system, and the steep rise of mortgage payments caused widespread distress among homebuyers. It damaged the authority of the government as an economic manager. The consensus it had secured at the 1983 Summit, and maintained by subsequent renewal of the Accord with the trade union leadership and the incorporation of peak bodies of the social movements, was breaking up – the problem with summits is that the view becomes Olympian.
Howard capitalised on this discontent to portray Keating as aloof and out of touch. He translated the construct of Middle Australia into an appeal to the ‘men and women of mainstream Australia’ whose interests had been disregarded by the ‘noisy minority groups’ of feminists, environmentalists, the ethnic lobby, the Aboriginal industry and the intellectuals who held the government captive to their special interests. He did better than this: he found a term in the Australian lexicon for those who were doing it tough – the ‘battlers’.
The word had popular currency among earlier generations, acknowledging the fortitude of the underdog who battled on regardless of the odds. The original battler was a stoic who defied misfortune, unlike John Howard’s enlargement of the description to encompass an aggrieved majority, but his appropriation caught the mood. Juxtaposing the practical concerns of his battlers to the indulgences of Labor’s pampered ‘élites’, the revitalised Liberal leader emphasised the national interest: the Coalition would govern ‘For All of Us’. That slogan appealed to many in the Labor heartland in the 1996 election, and the voters gave the Coalition a decisive victory.