Australian Journal of Politics and History最新文献

This contribution examines and reflects on a less-studied area of life during the Whitlam era: the machinery through which the government's expansion of legislated social security entitlements was administered. The government's record in this area warrants attention not only to gain insight into the everyday mechanics of social security administration in the Whitlam era, but also for what we might learn today from how those who administered that programme were pushed to comprehend the significance of the administrative realm as a site of politics, political action, and political relationships in its own right.

Australia has been harshly criticised for inaction on climate change. Previous Australian governments adopted an adversarial stance to counter criticism, notably at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) in 2021. How had Australia come to be in this position? We demonstrate it was not through inaction, but proactive government support for the interests of the mining and energy industries. Applying a three faces of power framework, we identify the relations these industries have with government as the reason why support was provided. Crucially, we show that it is not their structural power due to controlling underlying economic relations that explains their power. It is their ability to instrumentally command public subsidies and policy support. The discourse around economic benefits, propounded by both government and the industries themselves, served as a “smokescreen” to hide this reality. Far from being too big to fail or indispensable, we conclude that it is more accurate to say that instrumental power was successfully deployed to produce policy protections and “rivers of gold” in public funding.

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.