Australian Journal of Politics and History最新文献

The 2022 Australian federal election saw a record high vote for minor parties and independent candidates and record-low levels of voter identification with the major parties. Scholars have since described the 2022 election as both a “dealigning” and a “realigning” event. Such descriptions are useful commencement points but not definitive. In determining a more accurate classification, this article offers three arguments: first, that younger and female voters swung heavily against the Coalition indeed suggests a “dealigning” election, albeit merely the most recent in a long process of “dealignment”; second, that the election hinged disproportionately on the short-term factor of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's unpopular leadership suggests the poll was also a “deviating” event; and, third, it is impossible to classify the 2022 election as genuinely “realigning” until subsequent elections confirm the propensity of former Labor and Liberal Party voters to re-elect Greens and “Teal” candidates.

Conzinc Riotinto of Australia Limited (CRA) was the largest mining group in Australia after BHP. It had a major influence upon the post-Second World War mining sector and Australian economy. It was responsible for some of the country's largest resource developments, establishing an integrated aluminium industry, playing the principal role in the development of Australia's iron ore export industry, and developing a major copper deposit on the Island of Bougainville. CRA was established in 1962 as the Australian arm of the British mining group, Rio Tinto Zinc Corporation Limited (RTZ), formed through the merger of The Rio Tinto Company Limited with The Consolidated Zinc Limited. Consolidated Zinc was also London-listed, although with a deep Australian heritage based on its involvement in lead and zinc mining at Broken Hill. CRA's status as a foreign-owned and controlled company had a major influence upon its corporate priorities for the two decades following its formation. The company's foreign majority ownership restricted its business opportunities, particularly during the 1970s. However, as early as the mid-1960s, anti-CRA sentiment was evident from politicians, public servants, Australian mining competitors and, to some extent, the public. CRA's standing as “un-Australian” was viewed by company management as an impediment to attracting and retaining quality employees. These factors led CRA to engage with successive Commonwealth Governments to attempt to secure arrangements more accommodating to its business interests. This involved considerations as diverse as the takeover of the London parent company — to facilitate greater Australian shareholding in the Australian entity — through to the restructuring of CRA's interests in a new majority-owned Australian company. Ultimately, CRA was instrumental in changing foreign investment legislation, providing a pathway for it as a foreign-owned company to move to an Australianised or majority Australian-owned status. With this, CRA had an ability to participate in resource investments on terms similar to those for Australian companies. CRA gained naturalising status in 1979 and, in 1986, that of a naturalised or Australianised company. Differences in perspectives relating to strategic direction and financial management between the parent company in London and CRA in Melbourne, brought to the fore issues of control. The situation became so serious that it resulted in the departure of the chairman and chief executive on the eve of CRA achieving Australian majority-owned status. The events had a later influence on the formation of a dual-listed company structure in 1996. Through this structure, RTZ regained majority share ownership of the assets previously held in the Australian company. CRA lost its naturalised status and its identity as Australia's then second largest Australian mining company.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Aboriginal Affairs was a volatile portfolio. Gough Whitlam signalled a reorientation of policy with self-determination in 1973. However, in the succeeding decade, policy slipped back to self-management and self-sufficiency that were the default of the Coalition. The proposals for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission by Labor in the late 1980s brought self-determination back into the equation and sparked much heated debate. This article focusses on the parliamentary debates around Labor's proposed legislation to establish the Commission, between 1987 and November 1989, when the debates concluded and a severely reduced Act came into being. I argue that the Coalition's hostility to the proposal demonstrated an implacable resistance to self-determination and an agenda that sought to derail its possibility. Furthermore, I argue that the resonances between arguments for and against an Indigenous voice then and now demonstrate the radical nature of Labor's agenda in the late 1980s and suggest that arguments against the Voice to Parliament now might be conceived as unfinished business by conservative Coalition forces.

The concept of enforcing or mandated medical treatment has a history for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that it does not have for those in the broader Australian migrant and settler communities. This involves not just physical sites of hospitals, lockdowns or quarantine camps but also central issues of identity involved with the larger arguments over citizenship and sovereignty. These are important claims of control over others and for what reason or legitimacy. There is a hauntology that persists here for First Nations people and discussions around COVID-19 management especially in rural and remote areas of Australia must openly acknowledge this upfront. Since 2020, this discussion has involved competing and conflicting medical advice, hyper-partisan politics and conspiracy theories imported from overseas Sovereign Citizen movements that were not aggressively present during the previous H1N1 pandemic of over a decade ago. As such, this article skirts issues of uncomfortable echoes of medicalised quarantines of the past and uncomfortable alliances between (on the surface) seemingly ill-fitted groups, using the pandemic years as a case study in blackfishing, astroturfing, and co-opted grievance.

This study uses recently declassified documents to analyse the Fraser government's human rights policy towards South Korea. It demonstrates that when the Fraser government made its first human rights representation to the South Korean government in August 1976, it was under limited public pressure to do so, and human rights issues were of limited importance in the bilateral relationship. By late 1980, however, when political opposition figure Kim Dae Jung was sentenced to death, human rights considerations dominated Australian foreign policy towards South Korea, and public pressure on the Fraser government to try and prevent Kim's execution was substantial. The Fraser government's policy response to Kim's case was in part a reaction to public pressure, human rights considerations were also involved, but perhaps the most substantial factor driving the government's policy response was that Kim's execution was sure to sour the bilateral relationship and jeopardise the economic relationship. Overall, South Korea was a place where the Fraser government grappled with key questions about how to pursue human rights in foreign policy and where it had to address a human rights issue that had the capacity to seriously disrupt bilateral relations.

Recent studies of immigration have questioned assumptions about the effectiveness of government controls. In her work on illegal Jewish immigration to the United States, Libby Garland argues that official immigration quotas may not reflect actual numbers of immigrants and critiques historians for being too ready to take immigration laws at face value. Mae Ngai's work on the racialisation of “illegal aliens” in the United States also documents the failure of legislation to curb illegal immigration. Situating her study within this historiography, Sheila Fitzpatrick has re-examined Australian measures that aimed to limit the entry of Holocaust survivors and concluded that the number of arrivals was substantially higher than previously recognised, in part because migrants and their sponsors found ways around restrictions. In substantiation, Fitzpatrick drew on the archives of the International Refugee Organization and the Australian Government, and the papers of the country's first Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell. This article revisits Fitzpatrick's sources, as well as the records of Jewish organisations she did not consult. It establishes that the Australian government effectively limited Jewish immigration and the estimates of earlier scholars were substantially correct.

This article endeavours to answer the question as to what accounts for the preservation of peace in the United States and Ukraine in 1850 and 2004 when there was a potential for an armed conflict. I argue that parallels can be drawn between the events taking place in both countries in the antebellum period, and, through a detailed empirical comparison, it can be demonstrated that peace endures when, during a supreme moment of crisis, an “oligarchic peace”, that is a compromise, is negotiated at the level of national and regional elites that ensures representation and protection of property rights for the key elites.