Paul Keating: a Visionary of Power
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122 DAYS to Engage with the Coalition, If You Comments Create a Misconception to 2013 Haven’T Already – We Can Help with This
THE POLICY UPDATE 1 | M a y 2013 CLIMATE GAMIFICATION …by CEO, Benjamin Haslem THE POLICY UPDATE The Climate Reality Project, founded and Members get bonus points when Earlier this year we released our first chaired by former US Vice President Al someone responds to a pasted comment newsletter, The Shell, under our new Gore, has decided to take on their and clicks back to Reality Drop. brand – Wells Haslem Strategic Public opponents at their own game and have Supporters say Reality Drop uses Affairs. We intend to publish it at least established an intriguing digital project: competitive gaming techniques to twice a year. Reality Drop. combat climate denial online. Just to make sure that we bring you as Peruse most online articles about climate It could provide an interesting model for much news as possible about what we are change, where people are invited to leave political parties during election up to and what has piqued our interest, comments, and you would be excused for campaigns. All sides of politics accuse the we’ve decided to create The Shell Policy thinking a large number of people not other parties of flooding online Update… a smaller version of The Shell only dismiss the reality or threat of man- comments with information critical of published every few months. made climate change but seem to be their opponents. Here is the first edition. Feel free to quite knowledgeable about it. Of course, this begs the question, is provide feedback and some of your They sprout all sorts of facts and figures Reality Drop any different from the very information, anecdotes and ideas for the and present unsubstantiated claims to people it is criticising? It too is providing next edition of the Policy Update. -
Australian Broadcasting Authority
Australian Broadcasting Authority annual report Sydney 2000 Annual Report 1999-2000 © Commonwealth of Australia 2000 ISSN 1320-2863 Design by Media and Public Relations Australian Broadcasting Authority Cover design by Cube Media Pty Ltd Front cover photo: Paul Thompson of DMG Radio, successful bidder for the new Sydney commercial radio licence, at the ABA auction in May 2000 (photo by Rhonda Thwaite) Printed in Australia by Printing Headquarters, NSW For inquiries about this report, contact: Publisher Australian Broadcasting Authority at address below For inquiries relating to freedom of information, contact: FOi Coordinator Australian Broadcasting Authority Level 15, 201 Sussex Street Sydney NSW 2000 Tel: (02) 9334 7700 Fax: (02) 9334 7799 .Postal address: PO Box Q500 Queen Victoria Building NSW 1230 Email: [email protected] Web site: www.aba.gov.au 2 AustJt"aHan Broadcasting Authority Level 1 S Darling Park 201 Sussex St Sydney POBoxQ500 Queen Victoria Building August 2000 NSW1230 Phone (02) 9334 7700 Fax (02) 9334 7799 Senator the Hon. RichardAlston E-mail [email protected] 'nister for Communications,Information Technology and the Arts DX 13012Marlret St Sydney liarnentHouse anberraACT 2600 In accordancewith the requirements of section 9 andSchedule 1 of the Commonwealth Authorities and Companies Act 1997, I ampleased to present, on behalfof the Members of the AustralianBroadcasting Authority, thisannual reporton the operations of the llthorityfor the year 1999-2000. Annual Report 1999-2000 4 Contents Letter of transmittal 3 Members' report -
Graham Richardson
Graham Richardson Former ALP minister and political powerbroker Graham ‘Richo’ Richardson has a reputation as one of Australia’s foremost political operators and right-wing powerbrokers, despite having retired from politics in 1994. Graham Richardson joined the Australian Labor Party in 1966 when he was seventeen and soon apprenticed himself to the powerbrokers in the NSW Right, some of the toughest men in the Labor Party. So began a successful and colourful political career that took him from Labor Party branch organiser to General Secretary of the Australian Labor Party (NSW Branch), Senator for New South Wales for the ALP and a senior minister in the Hawke and Keating governments, making him one of the Labor Party’s key figures until his retirement. In his 11 years in federal politics, Graham held the ministerial portfolios of Environment, Arts, Sport, Tourism, Territories, Social Security, Transport, Communications and Health. Richo came to personify political ruthlessness and established the NSW Right of the Labor Party as a formidable political force on the national scene. He became famous for the line “whatever it takes” in reference to Labor doing “whatever it takes” to retain power. This also became the title of his best-selling account of career politics, published in 1994. Known as a king-maker, Graham Richardson had a significant influence on a great many political careers. He was instrumental in replacing Bill Hayden as federal leader with Bob Hawke in 1983 then Hawke with Paul Keating in 1991. After leaving politics in 1994, Richo spent eight years working for various parts of the Packer empire. -
The Case for a Commonwealth Anti-Corruption And
Closing the Gap: The Case for a Commonwealth Anti-Corruption and Misconduct Commission Brian Toohey Australasian Study of Parliament Group 2013 Conference: Perth, 2 – 4 October 2013 Commonwealth politicians and public servants want us to believe they differ from other mortals. They claim to be so incorruptible — unlike their state and local government counterparts — that they don’t need a watchdog. Even suspect state officials, it seems, are immune to temptation once they take a job in Canberra. The states either have, or are getting, formidable watchdogs to reduce the risk of corruption and misconduct among their officials. But the Gillard government in 2012 rejected a parliamentary committee’s recommendation that it should look at establishing a similar federal body. The commentators focused more attention on the lesser issue of whether federal politicians need a code of conduct after the alleged misdeeds of Labor’s Graig Thomson and the Liberal’s Peter Slipper. The general consensus seems it be that they don’t need oversight from a corruption body because “everyone knows right from wrong” — a not entirely reassuring claim in the circumstances. Although it was never clear why Australian Federal Police (AFP) was less susceptible to bribery than its state equivalents, the Howard government only established the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI) in 2006. The government confined the commission’s initial targets to the AFP, the Australian Crime Commission and Customs. While Labor’s justice minister, Jason Clare later added the quarantine service, AUSTRAC (the money tracking agency) and CrimTrac (the body that facilitates information sharing between various police and security agencies). -
Labour Intellectuals in Australia: Modes, Traditions, Generations, Transformationsã
IRSH 50 (2005), pp. 1–26 DOI: 10.1017/S002085900400183X # 2005 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis Labour Intellectuals in Australia: Modes, Traditions, Generations, Transformationsà Terry Irving and Sean Scalmer Summary: The article begins with a discussion of labour intellectuals as knowledge producers in labour institutions, and of the labour public in which this distinctive kind of intellectual emerges, drawing on our previously published work. Next we construct a typology of three ‘‘modes’’ of the labour intellectual that were proclaimed and remade from the 1890s (the ‘‘movement’’ the ‘‘representational’’, and the ‘‘revolutionary’’), and identify the broad historical processes (certification, polarization, and contraction) of the labour public. In a case study comparing the 1890s and 1920s we demonstrate how successive generations of labour intellectuals combined elements of these ideal types in different ways to develop traditions of intellectual work. The article concludes with a sketch of the labour public after the crisis of the 1920s. It considers the rise of the ‘‘militant’’ intellectual in the 1930s, the role of publicists, planners and experts in the 1940s, the skill of ‘‘generalship’’ in the polarized 1940s and 1950s, the failure to meet the challenge of the new social movements in the 1970s, and the decline of the agitational, movement-identified intellectual. Australians have often been described as an anti-intellectual people – almost as often as the labour movement has itself been dubbed with this dreaded sobriquet. The Australian labour movement would therefore appear to be a doubly marginal location for the thinker – an anti- intellectual fragment of an anti-intellectual culture. Appearances are not always deceptive. -
Basket Weavers and True Believers the Middle Class Left and the ALP Leichhardt Municipality C
Basket Weavers and True Believers The Middle Class Left and the ALP Leichhardt Municipality c. 1970-1990 by Tony Harris A thesis presented to the University of New South Wales in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Library Copy Sydney, Australia, 2002 © Tony Harris, 2002 Certificate of Originality. ii iii Acknowledgements This thesis is in large part based on oral history interviews and I wish to express my gratitude for the generous time given by informants, in participating in recorded interviews or in providing written responses. I also wish to thank the Australian Labor Party, New South Wales Branch for granting access to the Party’s archival sources at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, as well as for communicating with local branch and electorate council secretaries on my behalf. Jack Bolton, David West, Robert Grieve and the late Greg Johnston generously made local branch records available and Sue Tracey of the NSW ALP Labor History group provided valuable advice. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the Federal Department of Administration and Finance in giving permission to access the records of the Glebe Project Office in the National Archives. Further thanks are due to a wide range of people who were of assistance. The staff of the State Library of NSW, including Rosemary Bloch, Jim Andrighetti and Arthur Easton. The archivists and librarians from the NSW Housing Department Library, Leichhardt Municipal Library and National Archives of Australia, Chester Hill. George Georgarkis and Dianne Walker at Leichhardt Council. -
Corralling Conflict: the Politics of Australian Federal Heritage Legislation Since the 1970S
CORRALLING CONFLICT: THE POLITICS OF AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL HERITAGE LEGISLATION SINCE THE 1970S PAUL ASHTON AND JENNIFER CORNWALL PUBLIC HISTORY REVIEW, VOL 13, 2006, PP53-65 n August 1968, conservative National Party leader Joh Bjelke-Petersen became Premier of the state of Queensland. He referred to conservationists as these I ‘subversives, these friends of the dirt’.1 A generation later, few if any Australian politicians would have publicly attacked the environment and its supporters for fear of electoral damage. After years of major environmental battles which on occasion determined the fate of some governments, the environment had crashed through into mainstream politics.2 Natural and cultural heritage was firmly on local, state and federal political agendas. In the lead up to the 1996 national election Prime Minister John Howard, the first Australian politician to openly label himself a conservative, announced that ‘We’re all greenies now’.3 While highlighting the political importance of heritage and the environment, this was in part an attempt to reassure concerned voters that the states and territories adequately protected heritage places and values as the Howard government moved to ‘rationalise’ federal heritage legislation. Institutionally, at federal and state levels, a process commenced in the early 1990s of devolving responsibility for the identification, preservation and interpretation of sites and objects of cultural and natural significance to local government.4 Localities became the site for heritage frontiers that ebb and flow as different groups assert their environmental agendas. The 'local' is also the most flexible arena in which to accommodate differences – thus devolution of heritage responsibilities – and to manage conflict. -
Truth and Deceit in Contemporary Australia
Lying, Deceit, and the Commitment to Truth: On Ethics in Contemporary Public Life Jeff Malpas ABSTRACT: On the one hand, most of us would take honesty to be a key ethical virtue. Corporations and other organizations often include it in their codes of ethics, we legislate against various forms of dishonesty, we tend to be ashamed (or at least defensive) when we are caught not telling the truth, and honesty is often regarded as a key element in relationships. Yet on the other hand, dishonesty, that is, lying and deceit, seems to be commonplace in contemporary public life even amongst those leading figures in our society whom we might otherwise take to be the exemplars of public virtue. So is the emphasis on truth and honesty just a sham? Does the fact of our actual practice mean that truth and honesty matter only rhetorically, and, if so, does that mean that whatever it is we mean by ‘ethics’, truth and honesty are not a part of it? What I will suggest is that truth is indeed central to ethical practice, and not only to ethical practice, but also to a properly democratic politics, and that the apparent breakdown in the commitment to truth in public life is indicative of a deeper ethical, as well as political, breakdown. KEYWORDS: Truth, Deceit, Lying, Democracy, Ethics, Politics I. Truth and deceit in public life has, in countries such as Australia, Britain and the United States, become a major issue over recent years. Concern about deceit on the part of leading political figures was especially prominent in relation to the invasion of Iraq and the events that followed from it. -
Trade Liberalisation and the Australian Labor Party
Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 48, Number 4, 2002, pp. 487-508. Trade Liberalisation and the Australian Labor Party ANDREW LEIGH* John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University [T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. John Maynard Keynes1 The three most substantial decisions to reduce Australia’s trade barriers — in 1973, 1988 and 1991 — were made by Labor Governments. Labor’s policy shift preceded the conversion of social democratic parties in other countries to trade liberalisation. To understand why this was so, it is necessary to consider trade policy as being shaped by more than interest groups and political institutions. Drawing on interviews with the main political figures, including Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Button, this article explores why the intellectual arguments for free trade had such a powerful impact on Labor’s leadership, and how those leaders managed to implement major tariff cuts, while largely maintaining party unity. Labor and Free Trade In the space of a generation, Australia’s tariff walls have been dismantled. From 1970 to 2001, the average level of industry assistance fell from over thirty percent to under five percent.2 Yet in retrospect, what was perhaps most surprising was not that the era of protectionism came to an end — after all, this was a period in which tariffs were reduced across much of the developed world — but that in Australia, it was Labor Governments that took the lead in cutting industry protection. -
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POLITICS and gentle in one setting, cruelly arrogant in another. There is Keating the Fascinator a telling aphorism, Watsonian in form but Keating in sub- stance: ‘one cannot warrant the truth of one’s position by succumbing to the prejudice of fools.’ Neal Blewett Keating was incorrigibly wilful. ‘Put an open gate in front of him and he would not go through it; put a fence and he’d Don Watson try to jump it.’ Increasingly, as his premiership waned, ‘he Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: would not react to a serious challenge [in domestic politics] until he felt the shadow of the axe above him’. This became A Portrait of Paul Keating PM very much a problem for his minders. ‘Years of death-defying Knopf, $45hb, 756pp, 0 091 83517 8 struggle had given him the metabolism of a cornered rat — he could not get excited until the stakes were very high, HAT IS IT about Paul Keating that so fascinated preferably a matter of life and death.’ And yet sadness hung his retainers? Six years ago, John Edwards wrote about him. He could, as I know, be the most exuberant of men, Wa massive biography-cum-memoir taking Keating’s yet melancholy was never far away. Indeed, it was this sense story to 1993. Now Don Watson has produced an even of sadness that, for Watson, remains the dominant impres- heftier tome. Narrower in chronological span — 1992 to 1996 sion, perhaps even a sense of mourning, which ‘empties the — Watson is broader in his interests, more personal, mourner’s world, leaving it like an abandoned house’. -
Non-Government Organisations and the Australian Government: a Dual Strategy of Public Advocacy for Ngos
Non-government Organisations and the Australian Government: A Dual Strategy of Public Advocacy for NGOs Joan Staples A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Politics and International Relations, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of New South Wales May 2012 ii COPYRIGHT STATEMENT I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation. Signed ……………………………………………........................... Date …………………………………………….............................. AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format. Signed …………………………………………….......................... -
Political Corruption, Accountability and the Media: a Study of Motives and Justifications
Political corruption, accountability and the media: A study of motives and justifications by Stephen John Tanner B.A., M.A. Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Tasmania June 1999 This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any tertiary institution and that to the best of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis. Stephen J. Tanner Authority of Access !his thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying m accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 . Stephen Tanner June 4, 1999. Abstract Political corruption, accountability and the media: a study oi motives and justifications This thesis is about political corruption. Specifically it is concerned with two issues: (1) the way in which people alleged to have committed a corrupt act seek to justify their actions; and (2) how the media report the process of allegation and justification which invariably occurs when such an issue becomes public. In short the thesis is about accountability processes as they apply in Australia to elected public officials, particularly political leaders. The thesis uses a single case study - the so-called Metherell affair in New South Wales - to argue that public figures will invariably struggle to justify conduct which has been labelled corrupt. The Metherell affair represents an important case study because it illustrates how behaviour can be variously interpreted by different groups and individuals.