Paul Strangio

Labor and Reform of the Victorian Legislative Council, 1950-2003

In early 2003, the Bracks Victorian Labor Government enacted legislation ushering in arguably the most extensive changes to the States parliamentary system since the achievement of responsible government in the 1850s. The legislations chief purpose was reform of Victorian Labors historical nemesis, the Legislative Council. While the Labor Parties fought to subdue Upper Houses in each of the States last century, that struggle proved especially onerous and protracted in Victoria. Focusing predominantly on the period bookmarked by the two key milestones of Upper House reform in Victoria, 1950 and 2003, this article is an account of Labors battle with the Legislative Council. It explores what animated and sustained Labors struggle, the barriers that long frustrated its effective prosecution, the gradual evolution of Labors objective from that of abolition to reform of the Upper House, and the circumstances that culminated in the 2003 reform achievement. The article also highlights the paradoxes that attended the struggle, including at the moment of its success.

The Evolution of Prime Ministerial Afterlives in Australia

What does one do with a former prime minister who is determined to hang around in politics? The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has been grappling uncomfortably with this question since mid-2010 when Kevin Rudd, who had led Labor triumphantly into office less than three years earlier, was unceremoniously dumped by his caucus colleagues as party leader and prime minister following a collapse in his government’s opinion poll ratings and disquiet about his leadership style. Rather than exiting parliament, as seemed to be the expectation of his executioners, Rudd not only signalled that he intended to recontest his seat at the election due in the second half of 2010, but that he would seek a senior position in the Cabinet of his successor, Julia Gillard. Despite warnings about the pitfalls of such an arrangement (e.g. Abjorensen 2010), when Gillard was returned to office following the August election, she assigned Rudd the prized portfolio of foreign affairs. To date that arrangement has survived but has been a distraction for the government, which has been dogged by near continuous media speculation about the relationship between Gillard and Rudd, a search for splits in their position on foreign policy and opinion polls comparing the popularity of the prime minister and the man she deposed (e.g. Savva 2011; Shanahan 2011).

Simply waltzing on? Reflections on the performance of the Canberra Press Gallery in an era of prime-ministerial instability

This article draws on interviews with members of the Canberra Press Gallery to reflect on the performance of journalists in reporting recent national leadership instability. This is in the context of claims that reporters assisted in fomenting the instability and were ethically compromised. The increased pace of the news media cycle and the role of social media has caused a ‘cacophonous’ environment which journalist believe contributes to instability. The journalistic convention of background briefings is both central to the gallery’s performance in reporting leadership tensions and the major impediment to an informed assessment of whether journalists have assisted in fanning instability. We find that despite the centrality of the background briefing to the Gallery’s work, there is complexity and disagreement about the practice and the ethical standards that apply. This, we suggest, will be of increasing importance, yet the gallery’s willingness and ability to reflect on the issues is limited.

Paul Hasluck: A Life

friendliness and respect, the Kincannup were steadily pushed out of their lands, while the pastoral expansion throughout the Albany hinterland of the 1850s–1880s, and particularly the construction of the Great Southern railway in 1889, further constricted the rights and freedoms of movement of the larger Menang group of the Great Southern region. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the region’s Aboriginal people, as with those of the rest of Western Australia, faced the prospect of becoming a disenfranchised, powerless minority in their own country, as the 1905 Aborigines Act imposed a grindingly efficient regime which effectively removed their rights to choose where they could live, work and marry, and even bring up their children. Thus, as Arnold says, the ‘friendly frontier’ had become one that ‘differed very little from other regions of south-west Western Australia’ (10). While it may not have experienced the same violence and trauma of dispossession as other places, the result was very much the same. The author set himself a monumental task in seeking to cover a one-hundred-year history, particularly in view of the limited secondary material on Aboriginal-European interactions after the initial period of contact. Much primary historical research has gone into the task, and the author largely succeeds in his quest to highlight a little-known aspect of Western Australian history, skilfully merging the local records of settlement with secondary sources to tell a compelling story. The region’s Aboriginal people have certainly faced enormous disruption and dispossession, but, as the author concludes, they have ‘kept alive their culture’ as a distinctive people, albeit one severely modified by their experience of colonisation. Of course, more could be done, but this is the mark of good history; the book opens the way to future research that may involve oral history and biography, methods which could well bring new insights into the history of Albany and its region.

The 1960s in Australia: People, Power and Politics

O’Shane, she worked with other historians to explore the intersections between race and gender. By the turn of the century, ‘women’s history in Australia had acquired its own history’ and in Is History Fiction? Curthoys and John Docker were able to include a chapter on its historiography. Some thirty years after its birth, feminist scholarship in Australia ‘was thriving, but its subject matter was becoming less women’s history per se than a wide variety of histories, especially of colonialism, empire and race relations, all understood from a feminist perspective’ (70). One historian who applied a feminist perspective to wider historical questions is Marilyn Lake, whose chapter details how the ‘transnational turn’ has in the past decade and a half encouraged historians ‘to explore the interconnectedness of past lives and experiences in historical processes and relationships’ that link Australia to the wider world. However, this approach does not seek to displace national history; rather, it ‘interrogates, enhances, expands, contextualizes and explains it’ (286). After all, as is evident from Anna Clark’s essay on the history wars, and Peter Stanley’s on military history, the primacy of the national narrative is still very much intact. The evolution of another field of what might be called ‘connected histories’ is examined by Tom Griffiths in ‘Seeing the Forest and the Trees’. He details how Australian environmental history was brought into being in the latter part of the twentieth century by the experience of living in a land with a rapidly escalating human timescale, a history of dispossession, a unique ecology and a growing sense of national environmental crisis. In this context, historical research and writing has emerged as ‘a powerful tool in helping Australians understand their land and its biological and cultural inheritances, and in helping them to reimagine their island-continent nation as also the jigsaw of bioregional identities which it was for so long’ (264). Ultimately, a short review cannot do justice to seventeen chapters (and an introduction), and it seems a disservice to have singled out individual contributions—as I have done—for special mention. Suffice it to say that almost anyone interested in Australian history in its manifold guises will find something to engage and interest them; and university students and their teachers in particular will discover Australian History Now to be a gold mine.

Decision and Deliberation: The Parliament of New South Wales 1856-2003

Review(s) of: Decision and Deliberation: The Parliament of New South Wales 1856-2003, by David Clune and Gareth Griffith, Federation Press, Sydney, 2006. pp. xv + 735.

No, Prime Minister: Reclaiming Politics from Leaders

59.95 cloth.