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Australia in 1995

A federal parliamentary state (formally a constitutional monarchy) and member of the Commonwealth, Australia occupies the smallest continent and includes the island state of Tasmania. Area: 7,682,300 sq km (2,966,200 sq mi). Pop. (1995 est.): 18,025,000. Cap.: Canberra. Monetary unit: Australian dollar, with (Oct. 6, 1995) a free rate of $A 1.31 to U.S. $1 ($A 2.08 = £ 1 sterling). Queen, Elizabeth II; governor-general in 1995, Bill Hayden; prime minister, Paul Keating.


The debate in Australia over republicanism intensified in 1995 when Prime Minister Paul Keating announced that Sir William Deane, a High Court judge, would replace Bill Hayden as Australia’s 42nd governor-general. Deane’s appointment, which came as a complete surprise, was set to run from Feb. 16, 1996, to Dec. 31, 2000, fitting in with Keating’s agenda to replace the post of governor-general with the first Australian president no later than 2001.

Uncertainty about the timing of the next general election distracted both the government and the opposition during the year. Keating held the initiative, but he was unable to find a window of opportunity when public opinion was sufficiently on his side to make the risk of calling an early election worth it. In January, Alexander Downer resigned after only eight months as head of the Liberal Party of Australia. He was replaced by former party leader John Howard. Polls later showed much support in the main cities for Howard and the Liberal coalition in preference to Keating’s governing Australian Labor Party (ALP).

In the electorate, women and minorities were disenchanted by the ALP’s failure to live up to its rhetoric on preference for underrepresented gender and ethnic groups. These two issues came to a head when the ALP’s national hierarchy took away from a local branch the right to select a candidate for the safe Labor seat of Batman in Melbourne’s western suburbs. The local branch wanted either Theo Theophanous or Jenny Mikakos, but Keating intervened, with the help of the ALP national secretary, and installed the outgoing president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Martin Ferguson, as the ALP’s candidate. ACTU Assistant Secretary Jennie George was groomed to replace Ferguson as chief of the trade union movement. The first woman to hold this job, George faced a rapid downturn in union membership, with less than 40% of the workforce paid-up union members.

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Two cases on Aboriginal rights were before the High Court early in the year. In March the High Court ruled against Western Australia’s challenge to the 1993 Native Title Act, thereby reinstating Aboriginal property claims in that state. Less than a month later, a group of Aborigines who had been taken from their families as children under a 1918-53 law in the Northern Territory filed suit in the High Court.

Health Minister Carmen Lawrence (see BIOGRAPHIES) saw herself as the target of a royal commission. This view was endorsed by the prime minister, who used all the resources at the government’s disposal to protect Lawrence’s reputation. For his part, Howard was severely embarrassed by his inability to control a power broker in the west, Sen. Noel Crichton-Browne, who was eventually expelled from the party.

The Australian literary and artistic world was rocked in 1995 by three events. Helen Garner published a controversial book, The First Stone, in which she provoked a feminist backlash for her assertion that women should grow up where sexual politics are concerned. The First Stone was overshadowed by the furor over The Hand That Signed the Paper, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award only to land its author in hot water for misrepresentation of her ancestry. The author, Helen Demidenko, claimed that her tale of Ukrainian complicity in the Holocaust was based on her Ukrainian father’s family history. She was later unmasked as Helen Darville, the daughter of middle-class British immigrants. Subsequent arguments over the propriety of writers’ using misleading noms de plume were overshadowed by a controversy about the book’s main theme, anti-Semitism.

Hilary McPhee, the general manager of the Australia Council, ruffled literary feathers by describing Australian artists and intellectuals as malcontents who "deep in their bones seem to me to wish each other ill." McPhee’s Australia Council distributed $A 60 million each year and was often criticized because its funding procedures were deemed unfair by some. McPhee responded by saying that the Australian artistic community was unique in its lack of generosity, which had "more in common with a provincial town than a serious nation." There was a literary bright spot during the year when Western Australian novelist Tim Winton (see BIOGRAPHIES) was short-listed for the Booker Prize.

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Spices: Fact or Fiction?

A best-forgotten chapter in Australian aviation history closed in 1995 when the government finally bowed to pressure from its military pilots and withdrew the Nomad aircraft from service. Crashes killed 56 people before Sen. Robert Ray, the defense minister, axed the Nomad after a joint army and navy report found that the aircraft was not capable of carrying out its assigned tasks. Originally designed 20 years earlier in the hope that its short take-off and landing capacity would lead to a new export industry, the Nomad was soon found to have a basic design fault in the tail, which, Ray admitted, did not provide an acceptable margin of safety for military operations. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation followed up with a hard-hitting television exposé that lamented the prospect of the Nomad’s still being on sale for civilian purposes.

The Economy

Opinions varied on the strength of the Australian economy during 1995. The World Bank rated Australia as the world’s richest country by measuring national net worth, including natural resources, and concluding that each Australian had a net worth of $A 1.9 million. With an election due in early 1996, the government and opposition disputed the meaning of economic indicators. The Australian treasurer declared that Australians were living "in very good economic times," pointing to growth in gross domestic product. There were 16 consecutive quarters of positive growth, the best record in 25 years. By August 1995 annual growth stood at 3.7%, which indicated that the economy had broken free of the boom-bust cycle and had slowed to sustainable levels. Howard dismissed the good news as transitory, saying that it amounted only to "five minutes of economic sunshine." The opposition shadow treasurer, Peter Costello, commented that growth levels of less than 4% would not send anyone reaching for the suntan cream and criticized the ALP for hardening the Australian electorate to accepting bad news with equanimity. The Australian current account deficit, said Costello, was unacceptable when compared with those of Australia’s trading partners.

In May the deficit reached $A 3.1 billion a month, easing slightly in June and July to $A 2.5 billion and $A 2.1 billion. The small improvement was caused by the increase in exports of sugar, gold, coal, petroleum, and gas and brought the deficit into line with the budget forecast of $A 427 billion. Economists and politicians alike agreed that the key question was whether the huge balance of payments deficit and foreign debt would lead to a rise in domestic interest rates, something that would enormously damage the Keating government’s chances of reelection. Howard’s criticism was dismissed by the governor of the reserve bank, Bernie Fraser. Fraser was himself criticized by Costello for becoming involved in party politics while a civil servant.

Privatization remained a major weapon in the government’s economic arsenal. The national airline, Qantas, was privatized in 1995 in a relatively successful return of capital to the government. Although foreign buyers snapped up 53.2% of the stock (exceeding the government’s 49% limit), investors were happy with the market price.

Maximizing the sale price proved possible in the case of Qantas but very hard when it came to selling the national shipping company. The Australian National Line (ANL) had an annual history of high debt and financial loss, but maritime unions and waterfront stevedores resisted privatization. On May 22 the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. (P&O) line emerged as the only bidder. Three months later the auditor general revealed that the ANL had cost taxpayers $A 53.7 million since 1991. At the end of August, the Cabinet agreed to sell 100% of the ANL to P&O, despite the opposition of the Maritime Union of Australia and the ACTU. P&O guaranteed that the ANL would remain under the Australian flag with Australian-only crews on Australian award conditions. The prime minister warned the unions that jobs would be slashed if the ANL remained in government hands and urged the unions to accept the P&O bid. Keating made it clear that restructuring rather than privatizing the ANL would lead to massive job losses, with five of the company’s six vessels in international trade scrapped and lost. P&O, on the other hand, promised to keep at least four of the six vessels and to consider replacements for the other two.

The management of Australia’s largest retailer, Coles Myer Ltd., was subject to intense scrutiny in September 1995 as the company lost its second internal auditor in a month and sacked its finance director. Coles Myer’s most vocal activist shareholder, Laurence Gruzman, argued that the firing was an indication of wider problems within Coles Myer. Gruzman identified as the most important matter the transfer of the purchasing power of Coles Myer--one of the largest corporations in Australia--to small private companies. In response, Mark Leibler, a nonexecutive director of Coles Myer, pointed out that more had been written about the company in a week than about any other corporation in recent history and that every column inch had caused the company immense damage.

Foreign Affairs

The decision by Pres. Jacques Chirac (see BIOGRAPHIES) of France to hold a series of nuclear weapon tests in the South Pacific at Mururoa atoll seriously damaged relations with Australia. Demonstrations against the French tests were overwhelmingly peaceful except in Perth, where the French consulate was firebombed. Keating took a full-page advertisement in the Paris newspaper Le Monde on June 28 to explain to the French people why Australia said "no" to French nuclear tests, saying that if France had to test atomic weapons, why not test them in metropolitan France. The Australian government, said Keating, was deeply concerned about the possibility of accidents, as no one could foresee the long-term changes associated with possible leakage from the fragile atoll.

Another newspaper, Le Figaro, accused the Australian government of a "fetishist hatred of France," claiming that Australia was attacking the French in order to dominate Oceania. Chirac repeated the claim that Australia was behind the anticolonialist movement in the Pacific, accused Australian members of Parliament and journalists of being responsible for the destruction of the airport at Tahiti, and threatened to cut off importation of Australian uranium. Ambassadors were withdrawn by both countries as an expression of serious displeasure. France recalled its ambassador to Australia in August, denouncing Australia for breaking international law by stopping mail to the French embassy, delaying diplomatic bags, permitting demonstrators to attack the embassy, and holding French ships in Australian ports.

Significant political fallout from the Mururoa tests also affected foreign relations with the U.K. A delegation of senior Australian political figures, including the minister for Pacific Island affairs, Gordon Bilney, and the shadow foreign minister, former Liberal leader Downer, was snubbed by the British government. Bilney’s group traveled to Europe to protest against the French tests and to seek support from their European allies. While Finland, Denmark, and Sweden were sympathetic and helpful to the Australian cause, in London the delegation was able to see only a junior minister in the Foreign Office who refused to criticize France. The Weekend Australian pointed out that the conclusion Australia should draw from this was that the constitutional link between Australia and Britain was obsolete. In a lengthy editorial the newspaper explained that the divergence of interests between the British and Australian people was too great to allow the constitutional status quo to remain.

Australia’s growing emphasis on its relations with other nations in the Asia-Pacific region was apparent during the year. Keating had talks with Indonesian President Suharto in Bali in September and afterward testified to the warmth and strength of the relationship. Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans had earlier turned a very difficult situation around when Suharto nominated Lieut. Gen. Herman Mantiri as Indonesian ambassador to Australia. Some segments of the Australian press and the public complained that in 1992 Mantiri had made inappropriate comments on the Dili massacre in East Timor. Evans, through the careful handling of his relationship with his Indonesian counterpart, Ali Alatas, was able to persuade the Indonesians to withdraw Mantiri’s nomination. The incident was typical of Evans’ skillful handling of Indonesian relations, which were further improved when Indonesian ground troops took part in military exercises on Australian soil. Defense Minister Ray was keen to use every opportunity to conduct joint maneuvers and break down barriers between the armies of the two neighbours. Ray even threatened to outlaw flag burning when East Timor refugees marked the 50th anniversary of Indonesian independence by setting fire to the Indonesian flag in Darwin.

China was more difficult for Australian foreign policy makers. The poor treatment by Chinese police of Australian delegates to the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing received front-page status when the Australian ambassador to China, Michael Lightowler, became involved in a fracas while defending women under Australian consular protection from assault.

See also Dependent States.

Australia in 1995
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