Australian Journal of Politics and History最新文献

When fabricating numbers, humans tend to make systematic errors, favouring some numerals over others. Analysing twenty-first-century elections in which fraud has been alleged, researchers have observed anomalous patterns in the last digits of vote counts. I show that vote counts for the 2022 Australian election exhibit no anomalies, and then turn attention to nineteenth-century colonial elections in New South Wales. Pooling data for elections from 1843 to 1887, I find a less uniform pattern in final digits. Even so, formal statistical tests cannot reject the hypothesis that vote counts in these elections were unaffected by fraud.

This paper investigates the relationship between self-determination and sport through the exploits of the Brisbane All Blacks, an Aboriginal rugby league football club established in Brisbane after the Second World War. When the club was formed, the government policy of “Protection,” which legalised the forced removal of Aboriginal peoples to government settlements, was giving way in Queensland to the policy of assimilation. Aboriginal people in Brisbane, including members of the Brisbane All Blacks, were expected to renounce their Aboriginality under the assimilation policy and culturally absorb into white society. Oral history and archival research show, however, that the Brisbane All Blacks actively pushed back against these expectations. The footballers strategically navigated their settler colonial environment in ways that allowed them to exploit the assimilation policy for their own needs and purposes. The All Blacks' football activities and associated Boathouse dances facilitated the emergence of a distinctly Aboriginal community in Southeast Queensland. This community demonstrated a sense of pride and empowerment, as well as forging strong social networks, which enabled Aboriginal initiatives in the following decades. The All Blacks are a meaningful example of self-determination by Aboriginal peoples before formal self-determination emerged federally on the political landscape or internationally at the United Nations.

The Whitlam Government has an enduring legacy. Yet scholarship on the Whitlam Government rarely exclusively or extensively focusses on its disability policies. This article applies disability studies to analyse key policies of the Whitlam Government, including increases to the Invalid Pension, Sheltered Employment Allowance and Sickness Benefits, the Australian Assistance Plan, the Handicapped Persons Assistance Act 1974, and the National Compensation Bill 1974 to understand how the Whitlam Government understood people with disability and the ongoing legacy of the policies. It hypothesises that, although from a contemporary viewpoint the policies and how they understand people with disability could be problematised, it postulates that, in the 1970s, they reflect a significant shift in how people with disability were understood and governed. Further, it conjects that the policies can inform current disability policy.

By his own admission, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was not much of an economist, a disclosure that has fuelled criticisms of his government's performance during the economic crises of the 1970s. By contrast, Whitlam was a self-declared internationalist who promoted the domestic and global possibilities of the international system. Of course, twentieth-century economics and internationalism were mutual rather than dichotomous. Accordingly, Whitlam's internationalism provides a vantage point to re-evaluate his economics. This article focusses on how one strand of Whitlam's internationalism — his Third World sympathies and alignments — informed his government's resource policy, as designed by Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor. Rather than seeking to redeem Whitlam's economic credentials via this internationalism, however, I argue Whitlam's appeal to Third Worldism sought to infuse an anti-economics — or, more precisely, a critique of mainstream economic thinking — into Australian resources policy. The legacies of this critique have been enduring. Whitlam and Connor's attempts to establish export controls, foreign investment regulations, and state-owned enterprise galvanised a fierce backlash from miners and libertarian economists. This backlash has helped shape the neoliberal framing of Australian mining and energy policy over the past 40 years. At the same time, with climate change and energy transitions again illuminating the politics of natural resources, Whitlam's Third World critique remains salient.

The historiography of the political concept of virtue has been dominated by examinations of western European and North American sources. This article aims to widen the historical scope for our understanding of the influence of the concept of political virtue by examining how Anglophone conceptions of virtue were employed by the framers of the Australian Constitution during the Federation debates and the impact of those conceptions on the Constitution itself. It examines the strands of thought that provided the backdrop for the colonial adoption of the Victorian-era British conception of political virtue, subsequently showing how the Australian constitutional framers adopted these languages and concepts in their own writings and speeches. The Australian framers were concerned with the virtue of both the people and their political leaders, applying this concern in their contributions to legal and political discourse in the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, rather than a direct transfer of the more typical languages of republican virtue, the colonial context examined here offers evidence of a shift of emphasis from virtue into the concept of “character”. The framers demonstrated an interest in the question of character as they wrote and deliberated around the constitutional problems of political parties, bicameralism, and responsible government. So, too, they showed an acute concern for the importance of character in their institutional designs for a future federal commonwealth. This article demonstrates that the framers existed within the tradition of thought which held virtue, or character, to be central to the vitality of the polity, and that the framers adapted that language in their deliberations and the institutional design of the Constitution.

From its establishment in 1921, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) attracted political and public critique for flying accidents. This article explores how its nascent institutional ethos developed in relation to a problematic safety record. Military aviators were expected to balance airborne “dash” against obeying flying orders, risking castigation if they proved either too timid or too reckless. Despite vigorous attempts to isolate their service from scrutiny, Air Force leaders were forced to adapt the RAAF's safety culture in response to civilian expertise, media pressure, political machinations, and comparisons with other air arms — particularly Britain's Royal Air Force. Through the 1930s and the Second World War, responsibility was increasingly channelled toward individual personnel. Tactics included severe punishments, signed attestations that confirmed compliance with orders and an “endorsement” system that permanently recorded infractions in errant flyers' log books. These measures risked producing timorous and inadequately skilled pilots, unprepared to exploit their aircraft's capabilities to the full. In 1945, the establishment of a Directorate of Flying Safety profoundly changed the RAAF's institutional safety culture, but its accident record remained problematic. Over 1921–48, the “sweet spot” between initiative and dependability eluded the RAAF's quest to inculcate an enduring “spirit of the service”.

Gough Whitlam was deeply committed to the preservation of history, and keenly attuned to the importance of the documentary record in the writing of it. For Whitlam, the written record — the contemporaneous documentary record of government activity — was central to the production of historical knowledge and the “verification” of history. As he reflected on the release of his government's 1975 Cabinet papers, “the publication of these records confirms my belief in the contemporary document as the primary source for writing and understanding history”. This paper takes us through the shifting historiography of the dismissal of the Whitlam government by Governor-General Sir John Kerr. In doing so, it is a reflection also on the role of archives in the writing of history, recognising as Peters does, that the construction of an archival record is “a deeply political act”. This is particularly so for contested, polarised, episodes — of which the dismissal is surely the exemplar — for which archival records have been transformative. In this process of historical correction, revelations from Kerr's papers in the National Archives of Australia have been pivotal. Kerr's papers were also central to my successful legal action against the Archives securing the release of the “Palace letters” between Kerr and the Queen regarding the dismissal. This paper explores some critical “archival encounters” during that research journey — revelations, obstructions, missing archives, and even burnt archives. From the destruction of Whitlam's security file, missing Government House guestbooks, the denial of access to records, to royal letters of support for Kerr's dismissal of Whitlam “accidentally burnt” in the Yarralumla incinerator, these encounters illuminate the critical relationship between archives, access, and history which continue to shape our understanding of the dismissal of the Whitlam government.