Australia

5. Hudson and Sharp, Australian Independence (29 January 2024)

by kurto

Australia’s independence ought to be dated to 11 December 1931, when the Statute of Westminster took effect, finally devolving legislative power to the country as well as the sister dominions of Canada, the Irish Free State, New Zealand, and South Africa. Diplomatic sovereignty had been granted in 1923, followed by the 1926 and 1930 release of executive powers (i.e., disallowance, reservation, annulment of the Colonial Laws Validity Act) and the assignment of governors-general as responsible to national ministries. Notwithstanding continuing anomalies, the substance of facts make 1930 sufficient.

1901’s federation established the potential for independence but not its lawful basis. Though newly united, Australia hadn’t fully separated from the United Kingdom; the states remained bound to the crown; and the governor general remained responsible to the king, in the tradition of English government as the sovereign’s government.

The transition was driven by Canada, Ireland, and South Africa, running contrary to the Australian political will and transpiring with little public appreciation. Four elements fueled interest in imperial continuity: defense, race (culture), economy (loans from London), and status (British hegemony). Neither the Canadians nor the South Africans depended on British security; both the Canadians and the Irish (given the same status in the 1921 agreement) objected to their inability to amend their own constitutions; the Irish rejected personal union under the king. Whereas through the 1920s, Aussie leaders tended to be born in the UK. Only the New Zealanders sided with Australia on defense; but the British had been withdrawing from the ‘far East’ since before World War I, save for the 1923 construction of Singapore’s naval base. There was no practical means of international cooperation within the Commonwealth because there was no prior imperial body, only Whitehall.

At the 1923 imperial conference the UK determined to allow the dominions to make international treaties: paradoxically, external affairs preceded domestic matters. Executive independence emerged from the 1926 conference, as a political bargain between the ‘radical’ dominions which aimed to appease domestic nationalists and the UK’s wish for equivocation on the crown’s role and the continuing projection of imperial unity. The Balfour formulation established that: ‘[The Dominions] are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations’. (p. 93) The radicals then focused on autonomy, the Australians on common allegiance. (Newfoundland was also a dominion but too small to wield influence.)

By 1929/30, disallowance and reservation of dominion legislation as well as Colonial Laws Validity Act were to be jettisoned; but the Canadians and the Irish technically had to ask the UK to revise their constitutions, so the Westminster statute was promulgated. The Australians insisted on proactively adopting the statute, and delayed doing so: opposition party leader John Latham provoked the states to protest to UK on the spurious grounds of Canberra’s intrusion into their matters. Then James Scullin’s Labor government fell, and though Robert Menzies proposed adopting Westminster in 1935 and 1936, it wasn’t established until 1942 under John Curtin, largely to facilitate the trans-shipment of war material, there being no public pressure nor motivation for politicians. The states didn’t sever from the UK until the 1986 Australia Act.

4. Bramston, Robert Menzies (28 January 2024)

by kurto

Australia’s longest-serving prime minister mastered the mechanics of politics such that he reached an artfulness and unparalleled command. Major accomplishments include the establishment of the Liberal Party, sustained prosperity and the demise of sectarianism, and reorienting Australia toward the Pacific region; while he stumbled on the Suez Canal and Vietnam and stayed too long in office, losing touch with his cabinet and eventually voters. Like de Gaulle, he should have left sooner, in 1963. His distinctive crafted entailed deep understanding of government institutions (e.g., the Westminster system and the common law), policy guided by conviction (e.g., the goodness of family, home, and community), party management and alliance with the Country Party, astute retail politics aimed at winning respect (not popularity), and persuasion by logic, reason, emotion.

Menzies, becoming at 25 a nationally regarded lawyer through defeating HV Evatt in the Engineers case, which applied federal law to state jurisdictions, turned to politics to erase family dishonor stemming from his not enlisting for World War I service. Flashing to Attorney General and then PM, he supported appeasement (as Curtin favored conciliating Japan) but snapped to Britain’s defense. He visited London four times in three years before losing control of the United Australia Party, giving rise to reputation for British obsequiousness: The

    Sydney Morning Herald

editorialized his brilliance tarnished by lack of public understanding. (Bramston dismisses David Day’s claim he wished to replace Churchill.)

Menzies learned from his first-term mistakes and modified his public persona. He opposed Labor selectively and did not insist on undoing Curtin and Chifley’s great innovations – though he profitably contested nationalizing banking – believing it a mistake to contest settled issues, and that a PM first gained stature in parliament before winning voters. Over 1942-44, he gave weekly radio broadcasts touting the virtue of liberalism and famously the ‘forgotten people’, foreshadowing Reagan’s General Electric touring. Having established the Liberal Party by painstaking campaign and then formal convention, he resigned as party leader in 1947 to invite rivals: by 1949 he was a credible alternate to the wartime’s statist socialism. As PM, he left ministers to run their portfolios, provided they were masters of their briefs, seeing himself as primes inter pares, albeit with a naturally commanding presence. LP’s statism governed by budget policy and managing credit rather than bureaucracy. Menzies continued Calwell’s postwar immigration program (which he thought the unions wouldn’t have accepted if originating on the right). Abroad, despite deep sympathies with Britain he pursued Australia’s national interests by building closer ties with the US. He knew virtually all the West’s key players; Nixon regarded him highly. Menzies’ political philosophy was interpreted differently by Fraser, Howard, Abbott, and others (p. 115).

See also Robert Menzies,

    Afternoon Light

3. Davie, Anglo-Australian Attitudes (17 January 2024)

by kurto

Explores the Anglo-Australian relationship through stylishly recounted stories of upper-end society, culture, and sport (i.e., cricket): Australia’s ties have been fraying and the country must inevitably become a republic. Davie correctly assumes that connections which are not husbanded must decay; wrongly presumes Aboriginal problems means British and Irish heritage must also be; and nowhere considers that the Westminster tradition has been helpful to an effective political system. Less systematic assessment than a series of essays, Davie looks to have been deflated by 1999’s ‘no’ vote: ‘spiritual independence cannot be rushed’.

Menzies and cabinet had been surprised to discover Australia’s politics did not map to Britain’s. The key cultural break of the 20th century was Curtin’s refusing to deploy troops to Burma, prompting Aussie recognition that self-defense should trump imperial concerns. However, Britain’s 1941 decision to prioritize Europe was no betrayal, as in David Day’s telling. Australia and Britain hardly collaborated in postwar immigration: the UK resisted sending skilled people; the Aussie unions didn’t want those trained outside the British system; the ‘whingeing Pom’ had committed only £10 to emigrate and so took things for granted. The 1930’s self-deception (i.e., appeasement) did not persist in the 1960s, when the political class took the measure of Britain’s turn to the EEC and its Commonwealth Immigration Act – no more favored treatment for the dominions – and in turn opened toward Asia. 1964-70 was the most difficult period since the early colonial era, but the author confuses the correlated rise of the Tigers and China with causing England’s turn to Europe.

Manning Clark thought Australia was a geographic terms and self-contained historical topic. Stuart McIntyre and Davie see parallels to Australia in Canada and New Zealand, notwithstanding differing attitudes toward republican status. British educators and artists in exile are portrayed as exercising outsized influence on elite Aussie culture. In cricket, following a nuanced study of 1937’s bodyline tour, Aussie pragmatism ‘routs’ English romanticism. Less encompassing than Pringle, he dedicates an entire chapter to Windsor gossip and another to the editorial echelon of the chattering class.

‘When an Aussie enters a British room, you can hear the chains clanking’.

4. Welsh, Great Southern Land (11 Mar 2023)

by kurto

Australia developed very quickly in comparison with contemporary British dominions, the Federation launching with provisions for a near-complete welfare state. Whereas the high wages, high tariffs and White Australia consensus persisted until the eighth decade of the 20th century, and the new baseline not established until Howard ratified the Hawke-Keating Accord.
The continent’s settlement had opposed the world’s oldest society with its most enterprising: terra nullius was fairly applied (if regretted). By 1800 emancipist and former officers had made New South Wales self-sufficient in food, but marine products remained the principal export until the development of merino wool. 19th-century Aussie colonies were readily granted self-government, as in Canada Colonial NSW busied itself with land policy, immigration, and education. Frontier conflict, largely dormant until midcentury, sharpened with expanding agriculture and livestock and missionary activity (Anglicans being a less temperate influence than elsewhere in the empire). 1846’s revised leaseholding law converted Squatters from agitators to defenders of status quo.
In 1849, colonial legislatures were authorized to modify their own constitutions and unlike 20th century Africa, they quickly grew into the role, the author approving of such Chartist features as no property qualification, equalized voting districts, votes for women, and pay for MPs. Contrary to affinities for Ned Kelly and bushranging (or at least goldmining, sheep shearing, and droving), 35% of the population lived in the main cities (25% in Sydney or Melbourne), generally in crowded, poor conditions. Save for foreign policy and defense, they were largely independent. Governments grew up not by application of logic but common sense: Australia’s conservative bent was due not to British influence but legislative elites’ mistrust of democracy. Victoria was unsurprisingly less prepared for growth than NSW – 15 years after its founding Melbourne’s population of 140,000 was greater than Sydney not to mention Bristol, England, or Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1860, there were 1 million acres under crop, by 1900 7.5 million.
Inter-colonial agreement had been possible since Lord Grey floated the idea of union in 1848 but the first generations of responsible government had been more interested in practical matters. So the tariff was the main issue of the first Federation conference in 1891, along with the nature of the upper house. The Canadian model seemed most relevant, as the Westminster tradition was unwritten, and the US seen compromised by civil war / racism. (Meanwhile, because of current account surplus, Aussie debt per capital was £50 versus £12 in Canada.) The Federation charter was remarkable for anticipating (in section 51) the welfare state: government was given powers to resolve industrial disputes and to provide for old-age and widows’ pensions, maternity allowances, unemployment, medicines, and medical and dental treatment. Organized labor had not been part of its drafting, yet Australia was soon known as a workman’s paradise.
As nascent industries and labor wanted protection, while primary producers and conservative allies sought access to English markets, the matter was resolved by ‘imperial preference’, three-quarters of imports originating in the empire. Support for the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was unanimous, led by Labor and Queensland; it was not abandoned until 1966 (under Holt) and renounced in 1991 (by Hawke). Modern wage awards lasted still longer, as employers demanded tariff protection in return. Recessions naturally led to decreased wages and inevitably to labor unrest.
The author’s portrayal of the postwar era is conventional and less obviously triumphant yet more balanced than, for example, Macintyre. Where there was ‘a hint of Northern Ireland’ in prewar Australia – politics refracting religion (Labor = Catholic, Liberal = Protestant, characterizing wide swaths of society and government) – with the influx of Italians, discrimination against working-class Catholics diminished and stereotypes broke down. By 1970, multiculturalism was established in Sydney and Melbourne, the country towns remaining Anglo-Irish. Australia’s role in Vietnam left fewer scars than in the US. Menzies predominated; Whitlam shook Labor from its party centralization; Fraser’s Liberals struggled to articulate a positive program, as so often with statist conservatives. The Hawke-Keating Accord – trade-union wage restraint in exchange for controlling inflation and job creation plus award reform – broke the postwar prototype; Howard honored its resolution while also surmounting the problems of Mabo and Wik, the latter imperiling 70 percent of Australian land title. Republicanism doesn’t address the country’s ongoing racial animosities.
Often usefully comparative; largely celebratory though seeming regretful of racism by book’s end. Excellent maps.

8. Gordon, Dominion Partnership in Imperial Defense, 1870-1914 (25 May 2023)

by kurto

Traces efforts to establish an imperial defense strategy encompassing Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the Cape Colony in the years leading to World War I. The burden fell on Britain’s naval leaders, as the sea is not divisible, and while Churchill and Haldane made late efforts to establish political consensus, the matter was never solved: the British ultimately withdrew so as to defend the North Sea against Germany.
From 1850, Lord Grey championed relieving the British taxpayer, who shouldered 90 percent of defense costs. The Mills committee of 1862 commenced a decade-long withdrawal of military (army) postings to the dominions, paradoxically making imperialism a safe political cause. Britain thought the maturing colonies should progress from self-sufficiency to enlightened interest in the empire but the colonials wrangled over autonomy and the size of naval-subsidy payments to London. 1878’s Russian war scare carried the debate to more comprehensive review of imperial defense; in the following decade, the colonies were asked to participate in London’s councils.
Whether the empire ought to be a zollverein or kriegsverein remained unanswered: imperial federation were dead by the turn of the century, and as political imperialism waned, the Colonial Office’s Colonial Defense Committee (which morphed into the Committee for Imperial Defense) made the running. Yet the dominions were ‘patriotically’ responsive to the Boer War demands. Though the 1902 Colonial Conference produced no real advances in defense doctrine. Fisher’s appointment to the Admiralty and the initiation of two parliamentary committees in fact brought technical matters to a new phase. In this decade, the Canadians were pleased to acquire and staff two bases; the Aussies basked in the visit of America’s White Fleet, proof of a second partner against Japan.
The dreadnought crisis of 1909 opened the way to Canadian- and Australian-controlled navies, since Britain needed to husband cash to stave off the German buildup. Aussies welcomed Deakin’s efforts, while the Canadians contested Laurier’s for it cut across Anglo-French rivalries. (The New Zealanders, neither worried about the United States nor evidencing latent distrust of Irish immigrants, were typically content to sit close by the UK.) Thought the navy’s ‘blue water’ doctrine masked the degree to which the UK was retreating, the metropole knew the fight would be in Europe.

16. Pringle, Australian Accent (5 August 2023)

by kurto

Effectively a series of essays treating Australian society and culture, borrowing DH Lawrence’s conclusion that ‘the land is too big for the people’ – that is, British settlement on the eastern coast has generated bourgeois wealth but neither distinct culture nor identity. The Scottish-born, erstwhile editor of the Sydney Morning Herald observes the country in the mid-postwar era, when it was emerging from isolation via auto, radio, and plane. Politics comprised small matters, comparable to 18th-century England, when a man could launch a party and come to power in a lifetime. The Santamaria affair, which drove Soviet Communists from the Labor Party, receives the most specific attention. Wealth makes Aussies feel they are better off but not better. The Aussies were content with middle-class suburbia, there being nothing higher or transcendent, though all express longing for the Outback. Until the advent of TV, it was always better to be outside. In some of his best passages, from p115, he writes:

[In the Outback] Time resumes its ancient majesty of years and seasons. … There is nothing yet in the towns and cities which can compare with this lonely, privileged life of the graziers in the bush. Urban life is still essentially a second-hand version of urban life in England, America, and Europe. It would be hard to point to anything which is specifically Australian except, perhaps, the universal enjoyment of the pleasures of an outdoor life. … This open-air life has many virtues. It produces a strong, health, contented population, remarkably free from the worries and neuroses of most Western civilisations. … But it does tend to depress still further the general standards of education and the arts. … Unfortunately in Australia this low standard of cultural awareness seems to extend much higher in the social scale.

The country required an educated class, Pringle thought, for the rich especially graziers had declined to lead. But the country had no firmly established, nationally idiomatic arts – many of the most talented decamping to England. There was an emerging Rousseauan fetish of the Aboriginal, an observation well struck. Worried about Indonesia and Asia, unsure of its relationship with the UK, Australians are ultimately said to be lonely and disappointed (as per Lawrence’s Kangaroo). The concluding essay on Sydney rings true. The Lawrencian conclusion less so. Absent profound political crisis, crafting a unique, strong identity inside 250 years would be indeed miraculous.

5. Grattan, Australian Prime Ministers (10 Apr 2023)

by kurto

Short sketches of Aussie heads of government from Federation through Kevin Rudd’s first term, nearly all by different biographers. Prime ministers up to World War I were builders; through World War II adapted Australia’s role in the changing British empire; through the early 1970s economic growth was balanced with social cohesion; and through the Howard era Australia was ‘reentering’ the global economy and engaging with Asia. Nearly all tenures ended in political failure; the Treasurer is frequently PM in waiting. Many of the biographers, notably McIntyre and Day, are Howard’s ‘black arm-banders’.
• Deakin was the outstanding early PM (despite similarities with Barton), enshrining pro-British views, White Australian immigration to quell labor unrest, the balancing of export-led economy and domestic protection – the ‘national mastery of material circumstances’. Oddly, none of the contributors identify Welsh’s observation that the Federation constitution contained virtually all elements of the welfare state
• Fisher is credited for irreversible integration of Labor Party as a governing party, by dint of pragmatism
• Hughes prioritized centralized control for national, economic efficiency – nevermore to be trust by Labor, never by business
• Menzies’ longevity inherently involved failings, but do not cast him as fossilized – he he had longstanding ability to express, guide the beliefs of common Australians and was a man of principle. It’s remarkable his successors weren’t Labor. The collection suffers from the decision to treat him only once, in the WWII years
• Curtin renounced revolution for responsibility. Chifley took advantage of wartime controls and postwar credit, but overstepped h in attempting to nationalize banking
• McEwen built up Trade to rival Treasury, was the apotheosis of protection
• The Labor Party’s success over 1980s-2000s was founded in Whitlam’s administrative and political reforms. His economic beliefs were founded in 1960s Keynesianism, however, and his budgets were unsuccessful
• Fraser was ultimately orthodox and therefore reliant on maneuver disguised by Olympian demeanor
• Hawke’s reforms make him the greatest PM since Menzies, notwithstanding his fallout with Keating. The latter was a brilliant Treasurer but more partisan as head of government, albeit (apparently) the first of the Asianists
• Howard’s biographer opines he changed the country economically for the better and socially for the worse. His challenging multiculturalism as concluding there’s no value in social cohesion is left unaddressed

14. Garnaut, Dog Days (24 July 2022)

by kurto

Assesses Australian political economy near the end of the resource boom (circa 2013), asserting the need for more non-primary exports, decreased real-exchange rate (the Aussie adjusted for comparative interest rates, inflation, and productivity gains), and reduced living standards (less imports). Dismissive of political leadership, Garnaut, the Hawke-era government economist, barracks for technocracy. Why wouldn’t rivals respond in kind? How do his prescriptions escape the trap of public choice economics and unaccountable progressives?

Japan’s postwar boom had brought the center of the world economy closer to Australia; the impact of China’s post-1978 gains are well documented. White Australia had been inefficient because the country needed people as well as hobbled by encompassing protection, personified by McEwen. The Hawke-Keating era had never known a majority for reform: it was championed by independent experts. The recession of 1990-91 started backlash against reform.

Though Hawke ran a tight budget, the country did not save enough of the fiscal surplus (as a percentage of GDP), instead drawing the lesson that budgetary policy was ineffective.
The Howard administration is upbraided for acting to soften the introduction of GST and higher gas prices. Australia has yet to adopt ready-made foreign productivity practices: in the 1990s, growth trailed the OECD, 1.1 vs 2.5 per annum.

One-third of the economy is exposed to international trade, and the leading constraint on Aussie economy remains balance of payments. Health and education comprise 13 percent of GDP and 20 percent of employment. Accordingly, productivity must be packaged not pursued piecemeal. (Unexplained) monopoly pricing stops the declining cost of imports from reaching consumers, checking the desired depreciation of the Aussie. Immigration has raised skill levels and thus helps attract international capital (although such capital would seem suspect); the assertion that immigration reduces Aussie inequality in comparison with the US is unsupported, and there is no general discussion of social cohesion.

More in the policy realm, states lack effective powers to tax and therefore fiscal freedom while the Commonwealth cannot exercise powers of scale. Garnaut recommends constitutional review by experts. But states with larger equalization receipts have larger public sectors: public choice dynamics look to be at work: why would they not capture the review process?

A chapter on the green economy, now seeming a prelim to more recent work, fails the ex ante test: among many other examples, studies touting the effects the Olympic and the World Cup have been wildly optimistic and rarely address inevitable unintended consequences. Why should ‘climate change’ different? Aren’t advocates another special interest? There’s also a discussion of contemporary alternatives for taxing primary resources, summarized as ‘fair distribution’ of the burden of adjustment.

Most aggressively, Garnaut says no ‘thinker or leader’ has lead decisive historical progress (‘inflections’), crowing a number of questionable assertions about the capacity of political leadership, in support of arguments for technocratic government.
Politics in a democracy is inevitably a contest between groups seeking efficient policy for economic development and equity, and other groups seeking interventions to confer special benefits upon themselves or to kill or constrain interventions that would impose unwanted costs.
Abbot is chided for his determination to keep political promises in changed economic circumstances – why will public experts prove more adaptive? Confusingly, Garnaut suggests the relevant of international benchmarks (p.51) but also the failure of Aussie social sciences to stand independent (74). Private interests skew research.

How is technocracy insulated from moralizing practice (e.g., woke America) – Garnaut’s pandering through the back door?

3. Bryson, In a Sunburned Country (18 Aug 2011)

by kurto

An idiosyncratic and patchwork travelog of (mainly) outback and western Australia, taking special note of the country’s postwar trajectory away from ‘white Australia’ and ties to Britain, and the geological and biological diversity of the flora and fauna. Frequently the author uses himself as a foil. Humorous but largely forgettable; immersion in sports is a better way to learn the culture.

10. Warhoff, Well May We Say (2010)

by kurto

A collection of outstanding and well-regarded Australian speeches, 1850-2010. If Aussie rhetoric is known as laconic, sparing in adverbs with frequent hints of hilarity or sarcastic mirth, this aggregation of primary material sheds little light on the worldview that produces such communication. The book is organized by topic — nationhood, war, political and sociocultural debate, etc. — with useful (but sometimes presumptive) intros. A memento of our recent trip there.