Carolyn Holbrook

Housing in a Federation: From Wicked Problem to Complexity Cascade?

The Commonwealths periodic attempts at housing and urban policy reform since the 1940s have been made in the face of a federal structure that allocates responsibility for such matters to the states. This paper explores the experience of federal governments since the 1940s, considering the various styles of political leadership, varying ways in which the problem has been framed, and differing policy settings that have been employed in resolving policy challenges. The historical narrative clarifies phases of active engagement and reaction, linking these to fiscal asymmetry and distribution of federal–state responsibilities, historical ‘gateway’ events, and transitions in policy paradigms. We argue that housing is a perpetual concern (both a basic need and an aspirational objective) and is so integrally related to other policy domains—in which decisions may have unintended consequences for housing—that it is never conclusively resolved. The complexity (and uncertainty) consequent upon these inter-relationships ensures that housing remains a wicked problem. The visual metaphor of a complexity cascade, however, may assist a more nuanced appreciation of the direction of policy travel.

The role of nationalism in Australian war literature of the 1930s

Australian readers consumed with great interest the fruits of the war books boom that began in Europe in the late 1920s. But it was not until the early 1930s that returned soldiers in Australia began to consider the war in memoir and fiction. This article examines the nature of Australian writing about the Great War during the 1930s and seeks to explain why the conflict produced little work of enduring interest or literary merit. It argues that literary representations of the war, which gave emphasis to its tragic and traumatic elements, were overwhelmed by those remembering a war that challenged but did not defeat its Australian participants. The article traces the reason for the triumph of what can be called ‘middlebrow’ representations of the Great War to the nationalist boon delivered by the experience of war to a colonial settler society of uncertain status. In prosecuting this argument, the article challenges the transnational emphasis of contemporary scholarship about literary modernism and seeks to reassert the significance of the nation-state as a category of analysis.

The transformation of Labor Party immigration policy, 1901–1945

ABSTRACT The Commonwealth Labor government’s introduction of a program of mass immigration after the Second World War was a pivotal moment in the nation’s history. The program itself and the experiences of those who settled in Australia have been studied closely by historians and social scientists. Less attention has been given to the fact that the postwar policy represented a transformation of Labor’s traditional attitude to immigration. Since its foundation in the 1890s, the Australian Labor Party had been suspicious of immigration and opposed to programs of assisted immigration on the basis that migrant labour threatened the wages and conditions of Australian workers. This article traces Labor’s attitudes to migration before the Second World War and shows how economic and security exigencies compelled the party to repudiate its decades-long opposition to assisted immigration. The article suggests that the reason that the postwar immigration program does not receive greater prominence in histories of the Labor Party is because the policy and its chief architect, Arthur Calwell, are diminished by their association with the White Australia policy.

The Collaboration of Intellectuals and Politicians in the Postwar Reconstruction: A Reassessment

The reconstruction that followed the Second World War is remembered as a golden period of Australian policy-making, during which the foundations of the modern nation-state were laid. Studies of the Labor governments led by John Curtin and Ben Chifley portray an unusually close and productive collaboration between political leaders and their policy advisers in the Department of Post-War Reconstruction. However, close examination of policy development during the reconstruction era suggests that the notion of a ‘blessed conjuncture of reason and politics’, in the words of H. C. Coombs, masks significant disagreements between Labor politicians and policy experts. Using the development of the full employment and housing policies as examples, this article shows that the relationship between Labor leaders and bureaucrats was not as symbiotic as is commonly supposed. This reassessment allows for a more accurate understanding of the achievements of the postwar reconstruction and the historical relationship between political leaders and public servants.