Australian Journal of Politics and History最新文献

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.

With combat in Second World War shifting to the Pacific region after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the Allied General Headquarters was established in Brisbane, Australia, in July 1942. American military personnel in wartime Brisbane were subject to a two-tier criminal justice system, with the US military claiming extraterritorial jurisdiction over all crimes committed by American troops in Australia. In practical terms, this meant that American soldiers rarely faced local justice, which contributed to existing tensions between the American contingent and the Australian public. Although Americans accused of crimes were typically transferred to US custody, this jurisdictional arrangement did not extend to cases where Americans were victims of crimes allegedly committed by Australians. This article draws on extensive historical research to examine one such case, wherein American soldier Robert L. Norwood was killed by Australian Alma Muriel Morgan. By focussing on this case from the investigatory phase, and through the court process, it is possible to garner insight into the American experience with the Queensland legal system during the Second World War and to consider whether anti-American tensions (particularly around sex) unduly impacted on securing justice where Americans were victims of crime.

Two western Pacific states — the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG) — experimented with unusual and ambitious reforms aimed at strengthening political parties in the new millennium. In this paper, we look at what those laws entailed and how they worked in practice. In both cases, we find that unforeseen repercussions dominated. In PNG, the new laws encouraged candidates who formerly contested as independents to now nominate as members of microscopic one- or two-member parties whereas in the Solomon Islands many formerly party-affiliated candidates adjusted by contesting as independents. In PNG, the law was one of a range of devices aimed at strengthening incumbent governments, but money politics and manipulation of parliamentary procedure proved more significant. Core anti-defection provisions in the new law were ruled unconstitutional in 2010, but other still valid clauses preserved an advantage for the “largest party” in government formation. In the Solomon Islands, the law created a shadow world of free-floating individuals able to switch at liberty between formally constrained hermit crab shell parties. In neither country did these laws succeed in strengthening party systems.

NATO's unified command structure affords the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff influence in transatlantic foreign and security policy unparalleled with any other region. This, as Stephen Saideman has argued, is a function of the central role the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) plays in Alliance decision-making. This paper explores the early development of this decision-making structure. It is argued that the structures, norms, and rules that advantage US military advice in transatlantic security and foreign policy were a function of domestic US civil-military and international bargaining in the early development of NATO institutions. In exchange for supporting new US commitments in Europe, uniformed Pentagon leadership insisted on German rearmament and a key set of provisions in the development of NATO military structures and institutions that ensured US military leadership, especially regards the duties and responsibilities of SACEUR.