by the civil rights movement for African Americans in the US, Indigenous Australians began agitating to have all constitutional bars against their full recognition as Australian citizens removed.
Women’s rights campaigns: Liberated by access to a recently developed contraceptive (‘the pill’) and ‘no-fault’ divorce, Australian women began calling for equal rights, including equal payment for work done, the right to work after getting married or having children, and the removal of old segregation rules (such as those that fined pub owners for serving women in the front bar of pubs) that were starting to appear, quite frankly, a little archaic.
See Chapter 19 for more on the changes wreaked during the 1960s and 1970s in Australia.
Breaking Down the Fortress Australia Mentality
The ambition for pushing through and instituting great waves of social change came to a head under the government of Labor leader Gough Whitlam in 1972 to 1975 (see Chapter 19). Unfortunately for Gough, however, the economic good times of the postwar boom that had been sustaining the plans for social change came to an end during his prime ministership. The recession destroyed his government, as it did his successor, Liberal Malcolm Fraser.
The challenge of fixing the economic problems — including the special guest stars of high inflation, rising unemployment and declining industries — was so great that it took a concerted revision and ultimate termination of the original Fortress Australia economic policies first implemented early in the 1900s. This was a long period of sustained and largely unquestioned economic orthodoxy to up-end, but up-ended it was.
At the same time, another revolution was taking place — this one with a more multicultural flavour.
Opening up the economy
By the end of the 1980s, Australia had begun winding back tariffs used to protect uncompetitive industries. It had also opened up the financial market, and allowed the Australian dollar to ‘float’ and find its own level of value on international exchange markets rather than being kept fixed at an artificial and government-maintained level.
Opening up the borders (mostly)
At the same time as the economic revolution, a sustained and at times ferocious debate was taking place over Australia’s cultural direction. When the White Australia Policy had been dismantled in the 1960s, it was done with loud public reassurances that ‘social homogeneity’ continued to be the key ambition informing immigration policy. Australia was welcoming immigrants from many diverse and new parts of the world, but the job of the immigrants was to adjust and assimilate. The thought that Australia could be genuinely enriched by these diverse new arrivals was slow to dawn in policy circles.
The big turnaround took place in the late 1970s, when Malcolm Fraser launched a policy of multiculturalism and also began accepting large numbers of predominantly Asian migrants — refugees from the Vietnam War (see Chapter 20). The idea behind multiculturalism — that it was okay for immigrants to want to retain their own culture while living in Australia, and that Australia might actually benefit from these cultures — was a shift in Australia’s approach to the world and its attitude to itself so profound as to be seismic.
By the late 1980s, the policy of multiculturalism was provoking murmurs of discontent. A report to the Hawke Labor Government concluded that the pendulum had now swung too far in the other direction — that many people were worried that embracing multiculturalism and diversity meant valuing and esteeming all other cultures and heritages but downgrading and devaluing Australia’s own, the core British–Australian culture that had provided all the building blocks for modern Australia.
Entering the New Millennium
The 21st century began just as Australia was emerging from hard times and into a new era of prosperity and widespread wealth. Thanks to the hard yards of economic reforms in the 1980s and 90s, from 2004 Australia was in a great position to benefit by the China boom, China’s dramatic economic development after joining the World Trade Organisation in 2001. This created huge demand for Australia’s natural resources, as well as creating huge new markets for Australian education and tourism sectors. In significant part because of this Australia was able to avoid many of the disastrous problems that beset the north Atlantic countries in Europe and the US in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. In the 2010s though, China’s geostrategic expansion began to create a host of new problems for its regional neighbours to wrestle with, and Australia has had to navigate these changing realities.
Aside from ‘the China Question’, other global challenges haven’t been shy about imposing themselves. How best to deal with climate change continues to vex us, and has triggered the fall of Prime Ministers, Opposition leaders and whole governments. The Islamist attacks of September the 11th, 2001, (aka ‘9/11’) was followed by another terror attack on Australian and other western tourists at Bali in October 2002. The ‘War on Terror’, and protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was another by-product of the 2001 terror attacks, and have ensured argument amongst Australians on the rights and wrongs of this practically ever since. Whilst all this was happening other issues also demanded attention: Indigenous reconciliation, Same Sex Marriage, Asylum Seekers, sexual harassment of women, free speech and the freedom of religion have all elicited debate, much of which continues ongoing. And then there was that COVID thing …
As the third decade of the new millennium gets under way, the ongoing story of Australia is showing no signs of slowing up any time soon.
Chapter 2
First Australians: Making a Home, Receiving
