Författare: Joshua Black Visitor School of History Australian National U

At the last federal election, Australia elected the largest lower house crossbench in its post-war federal history.

In addition to four Greens MPs, Rebekah Sharkie from the Centre Alliance and Bob Katter (with his own micro-party), there were ten independent MPs, seven of them new to parliament. These MPs have the freedom and flexibility to vote on every piece of legislation without having to adhere to any party-room pledge.

Micro-parties and independents also fared well in the Senate in 2022, thanks in part to the fact that we use proportional representation to elect our senators. In a half-Senate election with 40 vacancies, six went to the Greens, one to Independent ACT candidate David Pocock, one to United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet and one to Pauline Hanson in Queensland.

Defections during the 47th parliament grew the crossbench even further. Five former Coalition MPs and Senators have moved to the crossbench, one over allegations of sexual harassment, one over the Voice to Parliament referendum and three over bruising preselection defeats.

Senator Fatima Payman defected from the Labor Party last year, citing problems with the party’s stance on Palestine, and has now set up the Australia’s Voice party.

Former Nationals MP Andrew Gee quit the party to become and independent MP over the Voice to Parliament debate.
Mick Tsikas/AAP

Getting elected

Independents hardly enjoy a level playing field in federal elections. Brian Costar and Jennifer Curtin pointed out in their book, Rebels with a Cause, that independent candidates lack equal access to the electoral roll, do not initially benefit from the public funding that flows consistently to the major parties, and cannot be listed above the line on the Senate ballot paper unless they form a group or party.

Unless they are party defectors with a seat in parliament already, independent candidates also lack the advantages of incumbency. Previous research from the Australia Institute has shown the dollar value of an incumbent MP’s entitlements (in terms of their salary and those of staff, printing and travel allowances, public exposure), is about $2.9 million per term.

Once elected, though, Independents have shown the major parties that they can be very hard to beat. Helen Haines and her predecessor as Member for Indi, Cathy McGowan, have won four consecutive elections between them. Zali Steggall, who famously beat former prime minister Tony Abbott in the electorate of Warringah in 2019, has been re-elected once, and the people of metropolitan Hobart have returned former public servant and whistleblower Andrew Wilkie to Canberra five times in a row.

No safe seats

Political parties and journalists have conventionally treated certain seats as “safe” (if the winning party’s vote two-party preferred margin was 60% or higher), others as “fairly safe” (if the winning party’s 2PP margin was between 56% and 60%) and others as “marginal” (those won by less than 56% at the previous election).

But the days of safe and marginal seats are over. These terms belong to an age of two-party contests and more predictable preference flows. As Bill Browne and Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute have pointed out, the major party vote share has now “crossed a threshold” below which the idea of “safe seats” becomes redundant.

Independent candidates can win with a relatively low share of the primary vote. In 2022, community independent Kylea Tink won the electorate of North Sydney with 25% of the primary vote, having ranked favourably, but not first, on many voters’ ballots.

Holding on?

Several contests involving current crossbenchers may prove nationally influential in the event of a hung parliament. Tink, whose electorate has been abolished in a routine redistribution, will not be among the incumbents hoping to hold their seat.

The Liberal Party, by some accounts, perceives the Perth seat of Curtin, won by community independent Kate Chaney in 2022, as an important litmus test for the future. January saw a “surge in volunteers and donations” for Liberal candidate Tom White’s campaign, according to media reports.

The Liberal Party is hoping to win back the WA seat of Curtin, held by independent MP Kate Chaney, at the 2025 federal election.
Richard Wainwright/AAP

Elsewhere, the Liberals are attempting to meet incumbent community independents with candidates that more closely resemble them. The Liberal candidate for Warringah, Jaimee Rogers, is, like the sitting member Zali Steggall, a former athlete with a public profile. Wentworth candidate Ro Knox, a former Deloitte consultant, will run against Allegra Spender, whose own pitch for re-election has emphasised tax reform and productivity.

In Victoria, Monique Ryan, who won the seat of Kooyong from then-treasurer Josh Frydenberg, will this time face Amelia Hamer, a local woman, professional and grand-niece of former Victorian premier Rupert Hamer.

There are exceptions to that pattern. Former RSL President James Brown was preselected as the Liberal candidate for Mackellar, currently held by community independent Sophie Scamps. And in Goldstein, there will be a rerun of the previous contest between community independent Zoe Daniel and her Liberal predecessor Tim Wilson.

At least three of the major party defectors in both houses are hoping to keep their seats, too. Gerard Rennick, formerly a Coalition senator who was denied a winnable spot on the Liberal National Party ticket, has registered the Gerard Rennick People First Party ahead of his bid for re-election this year. Rennick has pointed out that this will get his name “above the line” on the Senate ballot paper.

Former Liberals Ian Goodenough and Russell Broadbent have both indicated they will run as independents to defend their seats – Moore and Monash respectively – from their erstwhile colleagues.

Room for growth?

Despite the watershed result in 2022, the crossbench may grow yet. Fundraising group Climate 200 is reported to be backing up to 35 candidates across the country, and an army of volunteers has already begun to mobilise in support.

Health professional Carolyn Heise will hope that, with the support of the new campaign fundraiser the Regional Voices Fund, her second campaign in the regional electorate of Cowper may land her in parliament alongside Indi MP Helen Haines.

The retirement of shadow minister Paul Fletcher as member for Bradfield in inner-Sydney makes for a particularly interesting contest in that electorate. Gisele Kapterian, who won Liberal preselection against Warren Mundine, will campaign against community independent Nicolette Boele, who would need a swing of only 5% in her favour to win on her second attempt.

In Victoria’s western district, community independent Alex Dyson will attempt for the third time to win the seat of Wannon from shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan. Dyson came close in 2022 and would need only a 4% swing (two-candidate preferred) to win this time.

In 2022, community groups supported independent candidate Penny Ackery in her campaign against then-minister and now shadow treasurer Angus Taylor. The two-candidate preferred vote left the seat “relatively safe” (in old terms), but declining support for the Coalition saw the state electorate of Wollondilly (within Hume’s borders) elect community independent Judy Hannan in a “surprise win” at the 2023 state election.

There is plenty of potential for surprise victories and shock defeats at the forthcoming election. Community independents are running in at least four Labor-held seats. What should surprise nobody is that every vote in every seat will count on election day. Läs mer…

Even as a high school student in the 1920s, Jackson Pollock understood the value of art and culture. The young upstart and his friends caused a “classroom scandal” when they published a polemic criticising their school’s “overemphasis on athletics” and “disrespect” of the humanities. They called it the Journal of Liberty, implying that they saw humanities and the arts as essential for realising the American ideal.

Review: Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting that Changed Australia – Tom McIlroy (Hachette)

This episode is described early in Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting that Changed a Nation, a new book by journalist and first-time author Tom McIlroy. The colourful volume retraces the life and work of the groundbreaking, deeply flawed artist and his distinctive “all-over” style of painting.

It also retells the story of the Australian government’s decision in 1973 to purchase one of the most iconic of Pollock’s works, Blue Poles (1952), in an effort to drag a nation “from adolescence to some kind of cultural maturity”.

These are disparate stories that, when placed in the same frame, show us how much art and culture matter, and how scandalous they can be.

Inner demons and visual depths

Pollock was born in Wyoming in 1912, the youngest of five brothers, all of whom were creatively inclined. His childhood was characterised by movement and disruption, both reflected in his later artistic style.

Pollock was plagued by “inner demons”, as McIlroy puts it, resulting in intense moods, alcoholism, marital disharmony and infidelity. These things mattered, not just in his creative process, but in his relationships. They led to his death, and that of an acquaintance, in an alcohol-fuelled car accident in 1956.

Like many creative “genius” types, Pollock owed much to the women around him. Art entrepreneurs Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons gave him exhibition space and his livelihood for the better part of a decade. In the last year of his life, he binged on the attention he received from an “infatuated” arts student Ruth Kligman, who became his extramarital companion and the sole survivor of his fateful crash.

Above all, there was Lee Krasner, Pollock’s patient and long-suffering wife, whose career so often took a back seat to his, despite her own pivotal contributions to the abstract expressionist movement in New York. Not unlike Anna Funder in her account of George Orwell’s relationship with his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, McIlroy excavates a history of creative and marital tension that made the husband disproportionately more famous than the wife.

In artistic terms, McIlroy shows the aesthetic lineages to which Pollock and Blue Poles belong. From Picasso, Pollock learned cubism, with its capacity for iconography and the uncanny. From Thomas Hart Benton, he learned form and structure (including the device of the “pole”). From the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, he learned to be “an artistic experimenter”. From the critic Clement Greenberg, he learned to be “interesting”.

These influences are borne out in Pollock’s work, from the cubist Birth (1941) and the experimental Mural (1944) to the improvisational Galaxy (1947), and the enormous One: Number 31, 1950 (1950), described by one observer as nothing less than “a window on the world”.

McIlroy challenges misconceptions about Pollock’s most defining work. Art aficionados have debated the origins of Blue Poles. Two of Pollock’s friends claimed to have contributed to the canvas; Krasner rebuffed these claims. When the Australian government purchased Blue Poles, conservative MPs questioned “how the painting was made” and warned that this “Frankenstein’s monster” was fuelled by “marijuana, mushrooms or other drugs”. McIlroy makes clear that Blue Poles was the result of “months of toil” on Pollock’s part, predominantly alone.

For all the “hullaballoo” that surrounded it, Blue Poles is a difficult painting to describe. McIlroy evokes the “vibrancy and rhythm” in its layers of red, yellow, blue and silver. The eight blue poles are “stretched across the canvas like tree branches”, while the white splashes on the top layer complete the piece.

McIlroy calls it “monumental”. Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking has described it as “arresting”. For me, the defining quality of the artwork is its extraordinary depth. Parts of the piece are layered so thickly that it almost leaps off the canvas at observers, demanding undivided attention. That quality in a painting is priceless, figuratively speaking.

Blue Poles down under

The subtitle of McIlroy’s book is “the painting that changed a nation”. If Blue Poles deserves that mantle – does any painting, really? – it is not because of the work itself, its striking qualities notwithstanding. After all, it still leaves a bad taste for some older Australians with realist preferences, and it means nothing to many younger Australians.

Blue Poles changed a nation because it embroiled political leaders in an argument about Australia’s commitment to the arts and cultural sector. Faced with a choice between backdown and bravery, the Whitlam government and its key advisers on the arts chose the latter.

In 1972, the Labor Party made a virtue of its ambitious agenda for Australian arts and culture. Whitlam believed that “culture should be central in a civilised community” and that enjoyment of the arts was “an end in itself”. McIlroy shows that there was nothing elitist about this. The government believed in “widening access” to the arts, including by investing in the national collection.

Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1974.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

McIlroy demonstrates just how purposeful the acquisition was, in process and in spirit. Whitlam chose to disclose the price, knowing how controversial the record-breaking sum would be. James Mollison, the director of the fledgling national collection whose career was defined by this painting, wasn’t even that fond of Blue Poles. But for both of them, it was worth the political pain because “no work of contemporary art of such importance had ever been offered” to Australia before.

Their bravery has literally paid for itself. Blue Poles was worth US$6,000 when collector Fred Olsen bought it in 1954. He sold it to the art enthusiast Ben Heller three years later for $32,000.

Australia paid Heller AUD$1.4 million for the painting in 1973. Within 25 years, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was offering $25 million for it. Insurers valued it at $350 million in 2016 and $500 million in 2022. Even adjusting for inflation, the later values make the purchase price practically invisible.

The acquisition of Blue Poles sent a powerful signal to Australians that they deserved the best the world had to offer, even if many thought this wasn’t it. It declared that our national identity could be informed by international as well as provincial culture, and that government spending on the arts was not a luxury for the few, but a necessity for society.

Arts today

At the time of its 2016 valuation, senator James Paterson said that Australia should sell Blue Poles and use the proceeds to make a downpayment on public debt. The absurdity of this suggestion was pointed out by Waleed Aly, who observed on The Project that “it would take 1,344 Blue Poles” to eliminate Australia’s debt. Paterson was having none of it: “I don’t think we can afford such a lavish thing as a single painting worth $350 million.”

Paterson’s colleagues quickly discounted this stunt. But it showed that our political debate about arts and cultural policy remained burdened by the cognitive dissonance shown during the Blue Poles affair. We think culture is important, but we rarely agree on what it includes. We think some form of it is a necessity, but when public funds are involved, it can easily be refigured as a luxury.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a golden opportunity for the Australian Government to invest in Australian culture while borrowing costs were low. It could have done what the United States did in the 1930s: use public funds to invest in artists (8.5 million of them, McIlroy notes, among them Jackson Pollock), because it was a public good.

The opportunity was lost. A stimulus package appeared in mid-2020, but much of it was too slow to make a difference. Federal funding for the arts was subsequently cut by 19% in the Morrison Government’s final budget.

The Albanese Government’s Revive cultural policy and its associated funding boost was welcome, but its effects were quickly overshadowed by the ongoing cost-of-living crisis and its impact on artists, institutions and event organisers.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in front of Blue Poles, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, April 5, 2023.
Lucas Koch/AAP

What of arts policy today? Despite the meaningful investment in Revive, budget papers show a planned decline in expenses for “arts and cultural heritage” from $2.14 billion this financial year down to $1.85 billion in 2027-28. This is to make up for a temporary increase of 4.3% in sport and recreation expenses associated with the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games.

Previous research by the Australia Institute has shown that for every million dollars in turnover, arts and entertainment produces nine jobs. The same turnover in the construction sector produces around one job. By that logic alone, it makes little economic sense to rein in arts spending to pay for what is probably Olympics-related construction.

Tax reform would be another way of creating big improvements with small costs to the national budget. Many artists live on or near the poverty line, but if they are “in business”, their grants and prize income are considered taxable. The National Association for the Visual Arts has called for all arts grants and prizes to be income tax exempt. It hardly makes sense to give with one hand and take back with the other.

The same could be said in relation to Australia’s national cultural institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive. Efficiency dividends imposed on the public service require savings year on year. But unlike big government agencies, these are small institutions with a mission to collect art for the public’s benefit.

When public property and valuable artefacts were endangered by the leaky buildings housing them, the government offered a $535 million lifeline. But wouldn’t it be more logical to exempt these institutions from “efficiency dividends” so that they don’t get so run down to begin with?

Finally, the Commonwealth could make an enormous difference for a small sum with the creation of a youth cultural pass. Something as simple as a $200 voucher for young Australians to attend cultural events would provide a huge boost to the performing arts. A similar scheme for the visual arts would do much to promote engagement with Australia’s world-class art collections.

The Revive cultural policy may have seemed like a declaration of respect for the arts, but there are several things that still need tending to. The ideas outlined above would be targeted, inclusive and unambiguous in the signals they send about the importance of the arts. We have shown disrespect to Australia’s cultural industries for too long. Läs mer…

Fifty years ago, Liberal MPs chose Malcolm Fraser as their leader. Eight months later, he led them into power in extraordinary – some might say reprehensible – circumstances. He governed for seven and a half years, and remains our fourth-longest serving prime minister.

This year marks some awkward anniversaries for the Liberal Party. But this particular one is awkward for multiple reasons. There is the ruthlessness of Fraser’s quest for power, within and beyond the party itself. There is also the ambivalence of the current Liberal generation towards the memory of one of the party’s more electorally successful leaders.

After Fraser’s time in power, he and his party embarked on very different journeys that still shape our politics today.

How Fraser became leader

Australian politics was pretty febrile in March 1975. The Whitlam government, narrowly re-elected in 1974, was increasingly unpopular. Inflation ran at 17.7% in the 12 months to March, and unemployment was at a post-war high of nearly 5%.

Billy Snedden, Liberal leader from December 1972, was poorly placed to capitalise on these conditions. He had surprised many in 1974 with his strategy to block the government’s budget in the Senate and force an early election.

But having run a tight race, Snedden lost credibility with his post-election claim that he was “not defeated” but merely “did not win enough seats to form a government”. He won a leadership spill in November 1974 but not convincingly enough to prevent another one later on.

Billy Snedden (left), pictured here with Andrew Peacock, was unable to capitalise on the weaknesses of the Whitlam Labor government.
Wikicommons

A series of “unfortunate public gaffes” and unclear policy statements (on public health insurance among other things) left him vulnerable.

Fraser, who in 1971 sternly (and famously) warned that “life wasn’t meant to be easy”, was the obvious alternative. He was a well-known frontbencher and a former senior minister. His role in the downfall of Liberal prime minister John Gorton meant he had many enemies. But as the Governor-General explained to Queen Elizabeth II in one of his confidential letters, Fraser had “a reputation of being strong, intelligent, aggressive and tough-minded”.

Fraser studiously befriended new MPs whose loyalties were malleable, and used his portfolio (after the 1974 election, this was industrial relations) to win friends among his other colleagues.

According to one profile, he hired a public relations firm to help him solve his “image problems” and to counteract personal criticisms from his internal rival and fellow Victorian, Andrew Peacock.

Fraser sought to keep a clean image while his supporters, armed with the latest opinion polls, ran a backgrounding campaign described by Liberal MP Jim Forbes as “devious, unscrupulous and utterly contemptible”.

The crunch came in March. On March 14, Peacock, who hoped to flush Fraser out, dramatically called for a special party meeting to vote on the leadership question. At a Victorian Liberal state council meeting in Bendigo that weekend, Fraser and Peacock canvassed their supporters, while Snedden gave a speech blaming his woes on the media and the Labor Party. According to The Age, a group of MPs met in Toorak that night to shore up their own positions for the week ahead.

Under pressure on Monday morning, Snedden announced a party room meeting for Friday to settle the issue. Fraser confirmed his candidacy the next day. During four days of campaigning in which MPs pressured each other and party operatives worried openly about fundraising capacity, Snedden’s chances seemed to improve. Fraser’s supporters grew increasingly nervous and Peacock prepared to stand if Snedden lost the spill motion. The latter need not have bothered. In the end, it was Snedden who stood against Fraser and lost by a margin of ten votes.

In search of strong leaders

The Liberal Party has a special need for strong leaders. Gerard Henderson once diagnosed the party with a “Messiah complex”, while the political psychologist Graham Little argued that strong leaders gave parties a veneer of philosophy that could “whet the edge of political combat”. As Frank Bongiorno has more recently put it, strong leaders are those who provide their followers “structure, order and discipline” as well as “stark moral alternatives”.

The collective psychology of the Liberal Party worked in Fraser’s favour in March 1975. There were philosophical differences between the two candidates – Snedden later told his biographer that these contests were always driven by the “difference between conservatives and liberals” – but the vote really was about the styles of leadership they offered. As first-time MP John Howard recalled in his memoir, Fraser “sounded strong and looked like a winner”.

Fraser played the role forcefully for eight years, easily seeing off a challenge from Peacock in the final year of his government. Howard certainly fit the bill for much of his second stint as leader, and especially from 2001 onward. These men offered their followers a combination of ideological doctrine and hard-edged political pragmatism.

In the 1980s and post-2007, the party amassed an impressive history of leadership spills in their search for a strong leader. The current leader, Peter Dutton, made a spectacular contribution with his first leadership bid in August 2018. He eventually won the prize in 2022, not necessarily because he had the strongest claim to be a strong leader, but largely due to the lack of “viable alternatives”. That has made his position awkward at times, not least following the historic Aston by-election defeat in 2023.

Worlds Apart

Over time, Fraser became a trenchant critic of his former party, which hardly knew what to do with him. He failed in a bid for the party’s federal presidency in the 1990s, and was openly critical of its approach to race, asylum seekers and climate policy under Howard. He resigned his life membership shortly after Tony Abbott was elected leader in December 2009.

When Fraser died in March 2015, Abbott and his treasurer Joe Hockey led the awkward parliamentary tributes celebrating the life of a “genuine liberal”, while immigration minister Peter Dutton sat silently.

Dutton has played a key role in distancing the party from aspects of the Fraser legacy. Fraser abhorred racism, and his embrace of multiculturalism marks him out as different from several of his successors.

In 2016, Dutton controversially said that Fraser’s decision to resettle migrants fleeing civil war in Lebanon had been “a mistake”. He claims to have since apologised, but only to one senior member of the Lebanese community.

Fraser’s approach to Indigenous policy was also streets apart from that of Dutton. In the early 1980s Fraser’s government, on the advice of the National Aboriginal Council, considered a Makarrata commission to begin acknowledging the history of “Aboriginal occupation” and identifying areas for “increased Aboriginal involvement” in decision-making.

In 2024, Dutton ruled out a Makarrata commission, promising instead a more paternalistic approach to Indigenous affairs.

In 2008, Fraser attended the Apology to the Stolen Generations while Dutton, a senior Liberal MP at the time, boycotted it. (He has since apologised for this.) During the 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, Fraser’s former ministers for Aboriginal affairs supported the “yes” campaign. Dutton was its chief opponent.

When he died, Fraser was reported to be working on a platform for a new political party that would advocate for a Republic, a treaty with First Nations people, “a more independent foreign policy and a post-carbon economy”. In his book Independents’ Day, journalist Brook Turner suggests that some of the individuals who spoke with Fraser then are now at the forefront of the campaigns supporting community independent candidates.

This year, Dutton hopes to win back some of those seats from these independent MPs. The coming contest may indicate that the memory of Fraser’s version of liberalism still has a place in Australia’s politics. Läs mer…

The world had its eyes on Sydney in 2000. A million people lined the harbour to ring in the new millennium (though some said it was actually the final year of the old one) on January 1.

US television reporters called it “the biggest party in Australian history”. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, whose corporation seemed to represent the coming age, was among those watching on.

Australians saw in the new millennium with fireworks over Sydney Harbour.
RUSSELL MCPHEDRAN/AP

Sydney offered not only a world-leading party, but also a litmus test for the much-feared Y2K bug, which threatened to knock planes out of the sky and bring the global economy to a halt. Australia and New Zealand were said to be the “tripwire for the world’s computer systems”.

It was fine in the end, although plenty of work had in fact been undertaken behind the scenes to make Australia’s systems more millennium-proof than they might have been.

An advertisement offering Y2K advice in December 1999 in the The Times in Victor Harbour, South Australia.
The Times (Victor Harbour, SA)/National Library of Australia

This was arguably the defining feature of Australia in the year 2000: a confident display for the world concealing a lot of angst and uncertainty. Australia was the “oldest continent on Earth”, the US broadcasters told their viewers, but it was “much more of an Asian nation”, and much closer to the rest of the world “thanks to technology”.

Those confident claims would probably have surprised many Australians. Theirs was an old country trying to keep up with a new, interconnected world, and also a relatively young one trying to reconcile itself with the ancient cultures that its settler forebears had dispossessed.

Australia hosted the biggest party in its history, but would spend 2000 trying to figure itself out.
Dean Sewell/AAP

A curated Australia

In September, the world’s sporting and political elite, followed by a train of journalists, arrived in Sydney for the 2000 Olympic Games. It had been years in the making, and every level of government was involved. There were no fewer than 47,000 volunteers.

There was something for everyone in the well-curated opening ceremony. The event opened with the crack of a stockman’s whip and a fleet of flag-waving bushmen on horseback. There were highly sanitised displays of European arrival, pastoral settlement and a tribute to an armour-clad colonial Victorian bushranger that must have baffled those viewers watching from abroad who had not seen a Sidney Nolan painting before.

Ancient stories and new cultural sensibilities were on display too. There were stylised performances of the Dreaming, striking First Nations dances and the distinctive sounds of the didgeridoo. A section entitled “Arrivals” recognised the importance of migration in the nation’s story.

A young Aboriginal sprinter, Cathy Freeman, lit the cauldron in what became one of the iconic images of the year. The cauldron’s hydraulics unfortunately got stuck as it ascended, and the flame was mere seconds from snuffing out in what could have been a global embarrassment. But big ambitions incur big risks.

This global performance of Australian-ness was arrestingly simple: that of a nation confident in its own diversity and capable of catering to everyone’s tastes.

Even the musical selections seemed to reconcile the needs of the youth (with performances from a young Vanessa Amorosi and even younger Nikki Webster), and the more mature (represented by John Farnham and Olivia Newton-John).

Australia’s athletes had their best ever showing with 58 medals, including Freeman’s own gold.

Australians were glued to their seats to watch Cathy Freeman win the 400 metre sprint at the Sydney Olympics.
Dean Lewins/AAP

Not quite comfortable, not quite relaxed

The Olympics masked as much as they revealed.

In 2000, many white Australians still weren’t sure if theirs was, or should be, a multicultural society.

The reactionary Pauline Hanson was out of parliament for the time being, but her One Nation Party had won 7.5% of the vote in New South Wales in the March 1999 state election, and nearly 23% of the vote in Queensland the year before.

Eight weeks before millennium day, Australians had roundly rejected two referendum proposals, one to become a republic, and for a Constitutional preamble that, among other things, recognised Indigenous Australians as “the nation’s first people”.

But whether Hanson liked it or not, her lifetime had coincided with great demographic and social change.

While between parliamentary stints herself, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party was still making its mark.
Dave Hunt/AAP

In 1976, roughly 1.8% of the population said they were born in Asia or the Middle East. In the 2001 census, 1.6% of the population were born in China or Vietnam alone, and many more were the descendants of migrants from these places.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population had more than doubled over the same period, while those identifying as Christian decreased from nearly 79% in 1976 to 56% in 2001.

This increasingly diverse Australia claimed to be on a journey to “reconciliation”. That process had been sorely tested during the nasty debates about land rights and the Stolen Generations.

Corroboree 2000, held on May 27 in Sydney, saw the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and the nation’s political leaders present their visions for the next phase of national healing. The leaders symbolically left their handprints on a “reconciliation canvas”.

The following day, 250,000 Australians walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a moving display of togetherness. John Howard, the prime minister, declined to participate.

But his treasurer, Peter Costello, made a point of showing up for a similar event in Melbourne that December, leading Victorian Liberals and another 200,000 or so Australians.

250,000 people walked over Sydney Harbour Bridge to support reconciliation.
Dean Lewins/AAP

Their different approaches showed that the past was still a troubling present. Howard rebuffed suggestions of a treaty between Indigenous and settler Australians and maintained his refusal to apologise on behalf of the Commonwealth to the Stolen Generations, though all the states had done so by this time.

The idea of such an apology was not as popular then as it seemed later on. The prime minister was sensitive to the fact that his was “an unpopular view with a lot of people”, but an opinion poll in The Australian newspaper showed a majority of voters were opposed to a national apology.

Two survivors of the Stolen Generations, Peter Gunner and Lorna Cubillo, sued the Commonwealth for damages in 2000, giving their opponents the chance to challenge the legitimacy of their experiences. None of this looked like a nation that was as “comfortable and relaxed” as Howard had hoped it would be under his watch.

Border politics

Australian collective memory often gravitates toward 2001, the year of the Tampa affair and the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York.

But Australia’s border was already highly politicised in 2000.

In January, a boat arrived from Indonesia carrying 54 Christians fleeing religious conflict. They spent ten weeks at Port Hedland Immigration Detention facility, from which 39 went back to Indonesia and only 15 moved on to Adelaide to build new lives.

Port Hedland and other detention centres made the news for all the wrong reasons. There were riots, hunger strikes and multiple breakouts. Authorities responded with upgraded security perimeters, character checks, and strip searches without warrants.

The Woomera Detention Centre was described as a ‘hell hole’ by former prime minister Malcolm Fraser.
Paul Harris/AAP

Frustrated refugees set fire to South Australia’s Woomera facility, which former prime minister Malcolm Fraser publicly condemned as a “hell-hole”.

In an end-of-year reflection for The Age newspaper, Gary Tippet said there had been a “touch of mean-spiritedness” about the handling of it all. Chris Wallace rightly suggests 2000 was a crucial moment in the “march towards an absolute offshore, extraterritorial approach” to refugees in Australia.

In the intervening quarter-century, Australian officials have made mean-spiritedness an art form at the border and on the seas.

First-rate democracy, third-rate economy

Compared to the many legal challenges that came out of the US presidential contest in November 2000, Australia’s elections looked pretty smooth and sensible. The US seemed to have a backward democracy grafted onto its world-leading, information-age economy.

Australia looked the opposite: a first-rate democracy with what looked increasingly like a “branch-office economy”.

Reformers had tried for 20 years to make Australia efficient and competitive, but as one editorial in The Australian Financial Review explained, the country still suffered from its “old economy image”.

The tech boom would soon become the tech wreck.
Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

Certainly, Australia still sold its minerals and farm products to the world in exchange for quality cars and cutting-edge computers.

With global capitalists still enthralled by the global tech boom (though it was soon to become the “tech wreck”), they had little need for the Aussie dollar.

The currency’s value declined through the year to just 50 US cents, and it would fall further in the following months. On its own, this mattered little, but a quarter of negative growth at the end of the year meant, as Paul Kelly later wrote, an “election-year recession” seemed a “real threat”.

In the meantime, the much-debated Goods and Services Tax took effect around midnight on June 30 (a few hours later for businesses trading through the night).

Shops had sales ahead of the implementation of the Goods and Services Tas (GST).
Natalie Boog/AAP

The 10% consumption tax was a big deal. Costello said in his memoir the “prices of three billion products were to change all at the same time”.

The measure was politically brave, but soon became unpopular, helping raise petrol prices and alienate small business owners.

The punters were pretty confident the Howard government was heading for defeat in 2001. They were wrong.

Between the old and new

The pace of social change accelerated from 2000.

In the 2021 census, 2.6% of the population said they were born in India, and a further 3.2% in China and Vietnam. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians had more than doubled over two decades, such that they made up 3.2% of the total population in 2021.

People increasingly related to their economy differently, too. Half of the workforce had been unionised in the 1980s, but coverage fell to roughly a quarter in 2000 and just 12.5% in 2022.

Shopping at the supermarket in 2000 still meant being served by a human.
Julian Smith/AAP

These and other changes make our politics look different from that of 25 years ago. Nailbiter elections are now more common than thumping majorities and attitudes toward the once-feared “minority government” have softened.

For all that, many of the challenges of 2000 are still with us.

Many Australians are less tolerant of overt racism than they once were, but the 2023 Voice referendum and our offshore detention regime remind us that race still matters in this country.

Kevin Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations in 2008, but Treaty and Truth-Telling are left unresolved.

And for all our talk about human capital and the digital economy, resources make up a much higher share of our total export mix today than in 2000.

A quarter-century on, Australia is still caught between the old and the new. Läs mer…