Australian Journal of Politics and History最新文献

In 1951, performers from Daly River and Tiwi Islands Aboriginal communities staged a corroboree strike. The musicians and dancers had routinely entertained visiting cruise ships in the Darwin Botanic Gardens, but now joined dockside workers to protest the jailing and exiling of two Aboriginal agitators Lawrence Wurrpen (Urban) and Fred (Nadpur) Waters. In Melbourne, the Australian Aborigines' League expressed solidarity with the Darwin strikes and protested the exclusion of Aboriginal voices from the Jubilee of Australian Federation. The League's leaders Doug Nicholls and Bill Onus produced a new work of musical theatre featuring east coast Aboriginal performers Fred Foster, Margaret Tucker, Georgia Lee, Harold Blair, and others in ‘Out of the Dark — An Aboriginal Moomba’. In this paper we examine political uses of performance in Australia's assimilation era, and show how Aboriginal agitators used music and dance to connect struggles for rights across Australia, and to keep cultural identity alive. In doing so we show how performance operated both as work and as assertion of cultural sovereignty.

“No-Platforming” has increased in prominence within Australia in recent years. Furthermore, it has moved from university campuses to more mainstream sectors of the Australian public sphere. The “no-platforming” of an audience member on an ABC current affairs programme in March 2022 is evidence of this. By focussing on the arguments for and against no-platforming, as well as this incident, this article seeks to show their wider significance for no-platforming in Australia, and the implications of this for freedom of speech within the Australian public sphere.

During the Second World War, Australia received almost $2 billion worth of Lend-Lease aid from the United States — the largest foreign debt ever incurred by the Commonwealth. The settlement terms for this debt, however, were never defined or discussed during that conflict, remaining “an uncertain obligation to be assessed by an unknown person on an unspecified day of judgment.”² This paper examines the economic, military, and geopolitical factors that shaped Australia's Lend-Lease Settlement Agreement of June 1946. It focusses on the military aircraft which accounted for a quarter of this foreign debt. The least saleable of all Lend-Lease surpluses, these also proved the most challenging for US and Australian negotiators. Having contested initial US claims and secured sizeable debt reductions, Lend-Lease settlement was trumpeted by the Chifley government as a great diplomatic success. Findings from this investigation indicate instead that Australia's Lend-Lease settlement terms were restrictive, and possibly punitive, having been substantially determined by US domestic and partisan-political considerations. Moreover, these details and their significant implications were withheld from the public, the media, and the parliamentary opposition in the months leading to the September 1946 federal election.

The 1897 colonial conference coincided with Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and an outpouring of late-Victorian imperial sentiment. Against this backdrop of imperial celebration, colonial leaders met with Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, whose own views as to the importance of imperial reform were taking shape. For the most part, while grateful for Chamberlain's interests, Australian leaders feared significant imperial reform might undermine rather than reinforce imperial unity. As a result, the conference struggled to translate pro-imperial sentiment into tangible commitments. This article argues that the meetings between Chamberlain and colonial leaders in 1897 are worthy of examination not only because they shed light on Anglo-Australian relations but also because they provide insight into a significant period in the history of late-Victorian British imperialism and the development of Australian federation. Drawing on the confidential proceedings of the conference, this article offers a close reading of the key imperial issues under discussion and their resonance in contemporary Australian and imperial political discourse. Moreover, it contends that the conference debates reflected not only important issues in Anglo-Australian affairs, but also a series of broader ambitions and limitations when it came to the campaign for imperial unity in the late-Victorian era.

Australia's interactions with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), henceforth known as North Korea, have ebbed and flowed throughout their seventy-five-year history. In times of détente on the Korean Peninsula, Australia actively engaged North Korea and sought to facilitate its integration into the international system. However, during the recent détente in 2018–2019, Canberra broke with tradition and watched on as Trump, Moon, and Kim sought to negotiate a deal towards Pyongyang's denuclearisation. Why has Australia not followed its security partners and engaged, despite being an Indo-Pacific middle power and an advocate for non-proliferation? Answers to this question remain unknown in the international relations literature. Therefore, I conducted process tracing and identified seven “critical junctures” in Australia's relationship with North Korea while analysing its responses using middle power theory. Australia's preference for non-engagement is due to a shift towards a “maximum pressure” policy reliant on sanctions, reducing incentives to engage. This stems from a normative objection to Pyongyang's violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and limited material capabilities to persuade North Korea to denuclearise unilaterally. I aim to give an up-to-date account of Australia-North Korea relations and draw attention to a neglected area in Australia's non-proliferation policy.

Guided by participatory and deliberative conceptions of democracy, local governments have embraced the need for increased citizen participation in decision-making. Yet, at the same time, a systematic reduction in the number of councillor seats has seen a precipitous decline in opportunities to participate in the council chamber. With specific reference to the Australian case, this paper seeks to explain this incongruity, suggesting that the answer lies in the wide adoption of democratic theorists' narrow conceptualisation of the role of the councillor. Viewed solely as representatives, whether in the corporate, mirror, or delegate mode, councillors are valued only insofar as they prove instrumental to an efficient and responsive system of governance. Their participation, itself, is not intrinsically valued. Drawing on novel and extant empirical evidence to demonstrate the participatory virtues of officeholding, this paper argues that when due regard is afforded to councillors' participatory role, a normative case for widespread — and more inclusive — officeholding emerges.

In the debate over constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians since 2010, the high “Yes” vote in 1967 has been recalled as a benchmark of national unity and goodwill towards Indigenous Australians, something to which Australians must return. The 1967 referendum has been evoked as a “step” towards reconciliation, with constitutional recognition presented as the next step. The “recognition” that the 1967 referendum enabled has been (mis)represented as allowing Indigenous Australians to be counted in the Census, hence to “count” more generally. Explaining constitutional changes to voters in the referendum on an Indigenous Voice, “Yes” and “No” campaigns are likely to describe amendments in emotively powerful terms. False memories of “recognition” obscure a political fissure within the myth of 1967. Some who celebrate 1967 have wanted the Constitution to continue to distinguish Indigenous from non-Indigenous Australians, one understanding of the 1967 amendment to Section 51(xxvi); others have hoped that the next referendum would complete the deletion of distinguishing words that had begun in 1967 with the repeal of Section 127. The myths of 1967 combine to accommodate opposing ideals of national “unity”, allowing protagonists in the debate to read the “lessons” of 1967 in ways that reinforce their own political perspectives.

It has often been suggested that poor Australians were a forgotten cohort during the long period of post-World War Two prosperity. Yet the peak non-government welfare body, the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), aimed from its establishment in 1956 to publicise concerns about poverty, and stimulate policy responses to relieve the disadvantage of those living in poverty. Using a range of primary sources including ACOSS annual reports, policy statements, committee meeting minutes and newsletters, this paper examines the key manifestations of ACOSS advocacy for low-income Australians including research reports, budget submissions and public forums. It is argued that ACOSS gradually shifted from a welfarist approach based on lifting the incomes of specific vulnerable groups in isolation to a social justice approach that linked poverty to wider societal inequities.

The appointment of foundation professors and establishing Departments/Disciplines in the new Australian universities of the 1960s could be fraught, as the example of Political Theory and Institutions at Flinders University demonstrates. It is worth examining the dynamics of this particular case study because it throws light on the state of Political Science Australia-wide and the nature of the academic job market at the time, as well as revealing the gap between aspiration and outcome in the new Australian universities of the 1960s. The Flinders experience speaks to wider patterns.

Ralph Bunche, the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, was a committed anti-imperialist, a fighter against racism and for civil rights. And yet, his action and appearance as special representative of the United Nations Secretary-General in the Congo, made him appear as hostile to African independence and as a (neo-colonial) “blanc,” questioning the sincerity of his anti-imperialism as well as his anti-racism. The article argues that Bunche's dilemma is paradigmatic for the paradox that exists between the United Nations' (UN) declared anti-racism and anti-imperialism, on the one hand, and its politics of peacekeeping and peacebuilding which are effectively a quasi-imperial politics of world order, on the other. The article dissects Ralph Bunche's writing and thinking on the international system, Africa and the Congo in order to understand how individual anti-racist commitment can co-exist, or even be co-constitutive of, systemic racism of international politics and law. Apart from providing important insights into the thought of a central founding figure of UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding, the article contributes, hence, to ongoing discussions on Eurocentrism and race in international politics.