Australia

Australia is unique as a single nation within an island continent. For tens of thousands of years—indeed, as far back as scientific dating can reliably tell—Aboriginal peoples occupied this land. As hunters and gatherers, they lived in decentralized tribal and family structures with an oral cultural tradition. Knowledge of governance arrangements and community participation of indigenous Australians in this prehistorical epoch is fragmentary. They had elaborate kinship structures and a deeply religious view of their oneness with the land, as well as laws and practices that governed ceremonies, entitlements, marriage, land usage, and sharing natural resources. They used conservation practices in game management but were also interventionist in using fire that promoted the spread of the eucalyptus trees that define Australia's landscape. Apart from rock paintings, ethnographic reports by European observers, and fragmentary cultural practices and stories that have survived, most knowledge of this ancient epoch relies on prehistorical sources.

Modern Australian history dates from European exploration, beginning with sporadic visits by navigators in the seventeenth century. Captain James Cook (1728–1779) claimed British possession of the east coast of Australia in 1770, and the first penal settlement was established by the British at Sydney in 1788. Free settlers were encouraged, and the population grew with the spreading pastoral industries (especially wool growing, which suited a dry continent) and the gold rushes of the 1850s. The British brought with them their political culture and common law, and the early institutions of military governorship were transformed into separate democratic, self-governing colonies by the mid-nineteenth century. In this process, the Aboriginal peoples were dispossessed of their land, subdued by superior force of arms when they retaliated, decimated by European diseases and practices, and often denied basic citizenship rights.

In contrast, the British and Irish settlers enjoyed one of the most progressive social and democratic regimes in the world, with a comparatively high standard of living, a security guaranteed by British imperial power, and the "tyranny of distance." Because of their progressive democratic practices, highly paid and regulated labor markets, and extensive government provision of infrastructure, the Australian colonies, along with New Zealand, were variously considered as laboratories of democratic practice, state socialism , and a "workers' paradise." These descriptions were belied by the treatment of Aboriginal people, real wealth disparities, and periodic economic depressions.

constitutional design

Australia became a nation in 1901 when the people of the self-governing British colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania, and Western Australia agreed to unite in "one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown." The creation of a nation was the culmination of a decade of constitutional conventions, in which popularly elected delegates drafted a constitution that was ratified by popular referendum before being passed into law by the British parliament. The constitution preserved the separate colonies as states, with their established institutions of responsible parliamentary government adapted from Westminster , and it added a new tier of national, or commonwealth, government.

In its federal system, which enumerated particular powers of the new commonwealth government while preserving the rest for the states, and in the structures of the new commonwealth government—a bicameral legislature with an equal Senate and House of Representatives and a strong judiciary that reviewed jurisdictional disputes—the Australian constitution followed the American model. It differed, however, in having a responsible government executive based in the House of Representatives and in retaining a formal monarchy. It was also more democratic, specifying a popularly elected Senate and a procedure to change the constitution by popular referendum.

The Australian constitution is a hybrid of written and conventional forms. The written document specifies major institutional arrangements, such as the division of federal powers and the commonwealth's bicameral legislature and judicature. The key institutions of executive government, including the offices of prime minister and cabinet and the rules that govern their operation, are not mentioned in the constitution at all, however; these structures are well understood and widely practiced in colonial governments. Instead, the executive chapter spells out monarchic government by the king or queen of England and his or her representative in Australia, the governor-general , in archaic formalisms that are not meant to be taken literally.

The idiosyncratic complexities of the Australian constitution derive from its dual method of adoption—ratification by the people and passage by the British parliament—and its mixed modes of law and convention. Australian constitutionalism has struggled with reconciling these different principles and traditions.

During more than a century of practice, the system has worked reasonably well, sustained by a vigorous political culture that grounds the diverse and, at times, conflicting elements. The constitution has provided basic political stability while allowing for substantial change. The people have been reluctant to vote for constitutional changes, however, despite numerous referendums by various commonwealth—and especially Labor—governments to increase the ruling party's powers. Yet Australians have accepted numerous constitutional changes enacted through High Court judicial interpretation, some of which have increased federal powers.

Support has been continuous for a strong national government based on responsible parliamentary government with the prime minister and cabinet drawn mainly from, and answerable to, the House of Representatives. In effect, this means dominance of the ruling party and its leader, the prime minister. Federalism also has had strong popular support, however, both for the states as quasi-independent entities and for the Senate as an independent part of the national legislature. Ever since a proportional voting system for the Senate was introduced in 1948, it has rarely been controlled by the government. Australia's complex constitutionalism accommodates both pluralism and flexibility, enabling people and groups to support various parts of the system depending on their political views and the changing requirements of governance.

High Court judges and commentators have struggled to make coherent sense of the complex system. Having been schooled in the traditions of English common law and the Westminster doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, lawyers for generations had favored the British statutory basis of the constitution. Not until the 1980s, during Anthony Mason's (b. 1925) term as chief justice, did the High Court recognize the primacy of Australian drafting and popular ratification.

The problems of interpreting a constitution of mixed legal and conventional parts came to a head in the 1975 crisis, when the opposition-controlled Senate refused to pass the budget proposed by the Labor-controlled government led by Prime Minister Edward Gough Whitlam (b. 1916). In the ensuing power struggle, Whitlam was dismissed from office by the governor-general, John Kerr (1914–1991). The dramatic events raised numerous constitutional questions, and each party appealed to supporting principles. Whitlam cited the basic tenet of responsible government; namely, that the party with majority support in the House of Representatives was entitled to govern. The opposition, however, claimed that the Senate had legal power to accept or reject any bills, including budgets.

Both parties were technically correct. The authors of the constitution had trusted that future politicians would be able to resolve any contradictions in the text. Kerr's unprecedented intervention broke the deadlock and forced an election that the Liberal coalition won. Kerr, however, was forced to resign because he had become a divisive figure, and minor parties that subsequently held the balance of power in the Senate pledged never to block the budget. The constitution remains in the same condition as the founders left it; it contains several basically incompatible parts that, if pushed to extremes, rely on sensible politicians and a restrained governor-general to be reconciled.

constitutional development

Despite its contradictions, the constitution has provided a framework for the Australian government during more than a century of practice. It has endured in part because of its incorporation of basic principles of democracy, federalism, parliamentary responsible government, and constitutional monarchism, which have ensured continuity with colonial political traditions and have preserved both the colonies and monarchic ties with Britain, while providing thoroughly democratic and robust institutions for future politics.

The constitution allows for change through various mechanisms, including popular referendums and judicial review , as well as ongoing parliamentary politics and intergovernmental relations to determine citizenship issues and federal practice. The latter were especially significant, because the constitution did not include citizenship definitions or a bill of rights and had only broad formulations of the federal division of powers that were otherwise concurrent. Thus, Australia's century of constitutional development has been characterized by both continuity and change.

Referendums have been extensively used; as of 2005, forty-four proposals have been put to a popular vote, usually by Labor governments seeking to expand federal jurisdiction or to centralize power by weakening the Senate. Furthermore, many more proposals have been made but abandoned. Only eight of these referendums have passed; most of these have called for relatively minor changes, such as a seventy-year retirement age for judges or tidying up fiscal clauses. The pattern is clear: Australians are wary of ratifying proposals put forth by commonwealth governments that would centralize power in Canberra (the nation's capital) and the House of Representatives.

More significant changes to the constitution have been made by the High Court in its decisions in particular cases. Overall, the court's interpretation has favored the commonwealth ever since the landmark Engineers case. This decision, issued in 1920, stated the commonwealth government could determine the pay and conditions of engineers employed by state organizations. The Engineers decision adopted a legalist method of interpreting the power of the head of state's in a literal and plenary way, regardless of the impact on states' powers.

The consequence of this jurisprudence that still dominates the High Court has been the incremental growth of commonwealth power, evident in such notable cases as Uniform Tax (1942), which sanctioned the commonwealth's monopolization of income tax, and in several 1980s cases that gave a broad interpretation of the external affairs' power. On occasion, the High Court has curbed extreme and conservative commonwealth initiatives, most notably overruling Prime Minister Ben Chifley's (1885–1951) Labor government's attempts to nationalize private banks and airlines in the postwar 1940s and Robert Gordon Menzies's (1894–1978) Liberal coalition government's attempt to ban the Communist Party in 1950. Overall, however, the High Court's centralist bent has been in step with the growth of the nation during the twentieth century.

The gradual increase of federal power in the commonwealth is confirmed by the dominant political forces and patterns of intergovernmental relations that have developed and define Australia's rather centralized federal arrangements, especially in the fiscal area. The commonwealth retains its monopoly over income tax dating from 1942; it also has a monopoly over "excise," which has been interpreted broadly to include indirect taxes. Hence, the goods and services tax was imposed by the commonwealth in 1960 after agreement by the states.

The continuation of such a centralized system depends on sustained political will by the commonwealth and complicity by the states, which receive half their revenue from federal grants. The commonwealth government has entered many key policy areas such as education, health, and roads by distributing its abundant tax revenues in the form of tied grants to the states. The commonwealth also takes advantage of expansive judicial interpretation of its powers to play a major role in such key areas as environmental and human rights protection, by relying on the external affairs power and international agreements to which it is a party.

Despite such centralism, the states retain primary responsibility for many of the policy areas that affect peoples' lives, such as education, health, policing and criminal law, land and water usage, roads and transport, and public utilities. States are also responsible for local and municipal government, with state governments based in, and exercising governance over, the metropolitan cities where most Australians live. The division of real powers depends on ongoing intergovernmental politics, in which the states are clever players.

citizenship and rights protection

The Australian constitution does not define citizenship or stipulate a bill of rights; rather, it leaves these issues to the parliaments of the commonwealth and the states to determine. A few exceptions apply to the commonwealth but not to the states, such as nonestablishment of religion and paying fair compensation for property acquired for government purposes. The constitution requires that both houses of the commonwealth's parliament be directly elected by the people, that the number of senators be equal for each state, and that the number of members of the House of Representatives be twice that of the Senate and apportioned among the states according to their population. Nearly all of the states' parliaments are also popularly elected bicameral legislatures, except for Queensland, which abolished its upper house in 1922.

aboriginal rights

Ever since European settlers arrived in Australia more than two hundred years ago, the country's various indigenous peoples—collectively called Aborigines—have been fighting for their survival.

Massacres and, especially, diseases to which they had no immunity, reduced Aboriginal populations by as much as 90 percent; many of those remaining were driven out of the more fertile regions into the arid interior, and, as in North America, violence followed them with the frontier. On the island of Tasmania, the indigenous people (who were ethnically distinct from mainland populations) were actually hunted to extinction. Over the years the settlers maintained a policy of government-supported discrimination. In 1867 a law was passed prohibiting the sale of alcohol to Aborigines; in the most populous colony, New South Wales, an Aborigines Protection Board was established in the late 1880s, and similar bodies were established in the rest of the country by the early twentieth century. The purpose of these "welfare" boards was to control all aspects of the Aborigine's lives. Their policies dictated where Aborigines could live and work, hindered freedom of movement and forbade marrying without permission, eating in restaurants, entering pubs, swimming in public pools, and voting. Until 1967 Aborigines were not officially considered part of the Australian population, but part of the continent's "flora and fauna." The welfare boards were not abolished until 1969.

From 1900 Federal and state government agencies and religious welfare organizations underook the removal of light-skinned Aborigines from their families in an attempt to assimilate them into European society. Many parents "darkened" their children to save them, but tens of thousands were lost. These are known as "the lost generation." This policy remained in effect, officially, until 1972.

In 1962 Aborigines were granted the right to vote in national (but not state) elections, and in 1971 Neville Bonner (1922–1999) became the first Aborigine to sit in parliament. Because of past ill treatment the Australian government, in the late twentieth century, began funding programs to help the Aborigines, but the entire issue of race and rights is extremely contentious, along a familiar left-right political axis. There is also a movement among Aborigines for sovereignty, including political control of the Northern Territories and compensation for stolen land and resources.

States' constitutions are venerable statutes of the states' parliaments and can be changed by their members, although major changes such as restructuring the upper house would normally require a public inquiry as well as an electoral mandate . As previously mentioned, the constitution, which includes the states as integral parts of "one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth" has had a radically democratic amendment clause from the beginning—changes to the constitution require a double majority of both the overall popular vote as well as a majority of the states (at least four).

Hence, voting rights are at the heart of Australian federal constitutionalism and government, and elected parliaments support those rights, specifying them formally in legislation. Voting is compulsory and widely supported. The Commonwealth Electoral Commission ensures fair and fairly equal boundaries for the House of Representatives, whereas the states have their own systems that in some instances allow large discrepancies between metropolitan and country electorates. Although a world leader in some democratic voting practices (for example, women were enfranchised in South Australia in 1894 and by the Commonwealth in 1902), Australia excluded Aboriginal people from voting until 1962. The country also maintained a hard line against other "Aboriginal natives" of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, who were excluded entry by formal policy. The few Aboriginal natives who did manage to immigrate were denied voting and other basic citizenship rights.

Because no defining document exists, citizenship rights are scattered throughout the various acts passed by the commonwealth and states that address individual rights, responsibilities, and entitlements, as well as being embedded in common law and ongoing traditions and practice. Identifying and cataloguing them all is a large and complex task, as is comparing Australia to countries that have defining citizenship documents and bills of rights. Although no defining bill of rights exists, individual rights are probably as well-protected in Australia's democratic parliamentary system as in court-based bills of rights systems, with democratic rights having superior status.

globalization and future challenges

Australia's institutions of government are likely to provide stable and flexible government into the future. Continuing political challenges will be managing economic policy, ensuring individual rights, and fostering community participation. Achieving Aboriginal reconciliation and true equality will likely remain an ongoing issue; the detention of illegal immigrants is a blot on Australia's otherwise generous treatment of immigrants and refugees.

Since the dismantling of the "white Australia" policy in the 1970s, significant diversification and continuing high levels of migration has occurred. Australian culture has become richer and more pluralistic, although not exactly multicultural, because immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds become assimilated into the culture by the second or third generation.

Because many Australians live overseas, the country's citizenship law was changed in 2002 to allow native-born Australians to become citizens of other countries without losing their original nationality. This law change helped to equalize citizenship status of native-born Australians with several millions of their fellow nationals, who had been born elsewhere but retained their original citizenship after adopting that of Australia.

Regularizing the Australian republic by making the head of state an indigenous, non-monarchic office remains unfinished business after the defeat of the 1999 referendum. Although a majority of voters supported it, the 1999 proposal failed because large numbers of real republicans, who wanted an elected head of state, combined with monarchists in rejecting the minimalist proposal which would have changed the name of the office and allowed the prime minister to select the leader. Despite the defeat, many Australians continue to support an elected head of state with specified minimalist powers.

Although some champion it, a bill of rights is unlikely for Australia because the political parties are deeply divided on the issue, and individual rights are reasonably well protected by the parliamentary system. Federalism is well entrenched, although further invigoration of intergovernmental reforms will be needed to facilitate the coordination of multiple governments in complex policy areas.

Globalization presents ongoing challenges, although Australia has always been highly dependent on global forces and markets since it was first settled by the British. Australia's system of multiple spheres of government makes it amenable to adding additional global regimes of rule-making and standard-setting, and its close political relations with New Zealand provide a model for transnational collaboration.

See also: New Zealand.

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Brian Galligan