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History and Government
History: Terra Australis, as the continent was first known to Europeans, is thought to have been inhabited by man for at least 40,000 years. The aboriginal population, whose modern remnants describe themselves as Kooris, are thought to have migrated from southern India or Sri Lanka. The first European settlements were initiated in 1606 by the Dutch East India Company, which charted and claimed for their mother country 320km (200 miles) of the northwest coast which they named New Holland.
The explorations of Captain James Cook, 150 years later, opened up the east coast. The British Empire, having just lost her American colonies, was in need of a new prison colony. By 1868, when transportation ended, Britain had sent more than 160,000 convicts to Australia. They were settled around the coast – several of modern Australia’s biggest cities grew from the penal settlements and those set up by freed convicts and other European immigrants – and eventually enabled the British crown to claim the entire continent. The colonisers treated the Kooris with appalling brutality, but as long as European settlement was confined to the coast the majority of tribes were able to live as before.
This ended in 1851 when, following an exodus to the gold fields of California, the administrators sought to stem the tide by offering rewards for the discovery of gold in Australia. The subsequent gold rush prompted the first wave of voluntary migration to the continent in modern times; the population doubled within months of the discovery of gold in Victoria. Around the same time, the interior was charted for the first time while towns sprang up both there and on the littoral. The Kooris, meanwhile, were massacred, driven into barren areas or into lives of virtual slavery. Most of Australia was granted the right to self-government in the 1850s.
The Commonwealth of Australia, a Federation of States, was set up in 1901, establishing Australia as an independent democracy. Nonetheless, close links with the UK were maintained; Australian troops fought alongside the British during both World Wars. The politics of the country remained under firm British supervision until years after World War II. In the aftermath, Australia assumed some of the trappings of a regional power, taking control of some of Germany’s former territories in the area and developing links with Japan, India and South-East Asia. It also joined in a secretive strategic alliance with Britain, the USA, Canada and New Zealand, and this remains the country’s principal defence commitment. Until its abandonment in the mid-1960s, a ‘White Australia’ policy was officially adopted with regard to immigration.
Between 1949 and 1972, Australian governments were composed of the Liberal Party in a centre-right coalition with the smaller National Country Party. Sir Robert Menzies was the dominant political figure, serving 16 years as Prime Minister. In 1972, the coalition was finally defeated at the polls and the Labour Party under Gough Whitlam took office with a comparatively radical agenda. There followed one of the most controversial periods of recent Australian history culminating in the Whitlam government being dismissed by the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, in circumstances still hotly disputed. The immediate beneficiary was the Liberal Party leader, Malcolm Fraser, who won the next elections, which followed in December 1975, within weeks of Whitlam’s dismissal. Fraser remained in office until 1983, when Labour was returned to power under the leadership of the ex-trade-union leader Bob Hawke. Under Hawke and his acerbic Treasury Minister and eventual successor, Paul Keating, the Labour party won five elections in a row.
Finally, in March 1996, tiring of Labour, the Australian public turned to the Liberal Party led by John Howard. Howard’s centre-right coalition was returned to office for a second term at the 1998 general election, an ill-tempered affair in which a key issue was aboriginal land rights. Successive Australian governments have found considerable difficulty in reconciling Koori peoples’ traditional claims and conceptions of land ownership with, to take but one example, the requirements of mining companies. The popular mood in some areas of the country against concessions to Koori land rights was reflected in the brief emergence of the One Nation Party. With a basically racist agenda, its electoral challenge peaked briefly before fading in 1998.
The other dominant political issue of the period was Australia’s constitutional future. The principal options, aired at a government-sponsored Constitutional Convention in February 1998, were to maintain the existing constitutional link with Britain; or to establish Australia as a fully fledged republic. A split in the republican camp produced a victory for the traditionalists in the national referendum on the subject held in October 1999. The result was something of a surprise, given that Australians now look to links with Asia as more important and relevant to their future than those with the ‘Old Country’. The Asian influence upon Australia is substantial and irreversible, and the country’s foreign policy (irrespective of the party in power) is now geared to the strengthening of economic and political links with the countries of the Asian Pacific Rim. The constitutional issue is far from dead, however, and will return to the centre stage of Australian politics in due course.
Immigration has now come to dominate the Australian domestic agenda. In the run-up to the most recent election in November 2001, the anti-immigrant One Nation Party showed signs of a brief resurgence. This was a temporary phenomenon, and the party has since disappeared without trace. But the incumbent Conservative Premier, John Howard, cleverly exploited the issue to pull off an unlikely victory over Kim Beazley’s Labour Party. The hard line which Howard set down has been rigorously pursued ever since: ‘boat people’ from the troubled states of Asia have been prevented from landing in Australia and directed to small Pacific islands; those who do reach Australia are held in remote outback encampments.
Government: The bicameral Federal Parliament holds legislative power. Both chambers are elected by universal adult suffrage. The 76-member Senate serves a six-year term, while the House of Representatives is voted in every three years. The Prime Minister is the leader of the largest party in the Lower House, and wields executive power at the head of a Cabinet of Ministers. The Queen of England is formally head of state, represented locally by a Governor General. Each of Australia’s six states also has its own directly elected legislature, enjoying considerable autonomy in areas such as health, education and transport policy.
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