...The nation of Australia also began undergoing changes in the 1960s, especially with the end of the White Australia policy, coming to terms of the country's sordid history with the indigenous inhabitants of the country-continent, and the permanent rise of a new national identity that cast Australia as its own nation rather than just part of a larger Commonweath whole. Australia's involvement in Vietnam started out, like that of the United States, with popular approval but by the end of the decade the war had become deeply unpopular with voters.
John Gorton had replaced Harold Holt, who famously disappeared after jumping into the ocean for a swim, as Liberal leader and became the prime minister in early 1968. Gorton succeeded in winning the 1969 election for the Liberal/National coalition largely on the back of the planned withdrawal from Vietnam, but he proved to be a media disaster as prime minister and his political stumbles caused him to face a leadership challenge into his term. William McMahon was elected and given the unenviable task of putting the Coalition back on the right track to another term in just 18 months. The Coalition's answer to "quality of life" issues had been to pawn the responsibility off to the states, but this answer had increasingly worn thin with voters after the states continued to fail to either enact needed policies or lacked the jurisdiction or funding to do so.
It was no surprise that Australian voters, for the first time in 23 years, voted a new party in and the Labor Party under Gough Whitlam won a majority. Whitlam's prime ministry would be among the most eventful in Australian history. The Labor government would oversee the introduction of universal health care, university fees abolished, creation of legal aid programs and the end of national service. The final remnants of the White Australia policy were similarly ended by the Whitlam government and the Australian mandate over Papua and New Guinea ended when the country became independent as Papua New Guinea in 1975. Whitlam faced tremendous opposition from the Senate, where Labor lacked control, and many states, who were opposed to his activist role. Labor won a narrow majority in 1974 and the Senate gained enough Labor and Labor-friendly independents to give Whitlam's government breathing room, and the social advances continued in Whitlam's second term as Aboriginal land reform enabled members of the indigenous tribes in Australia's Northern Territory to claim the title to land if they could prove they could prove traditional association with it, stronger environmental regulations were passed, and funding was increased to education.
However, the Whitlam government had many critics. From the left, the government was hammered for following the lead of the Muskie administration and giving the Indonesian leader Suharto
carte blanche to annex East Timor following the rapid decolonization of Portugal's colonies following the end of the European country's Estado Novo regime in 1975. The Indonesian occupation would be brutal and devastating for the Timorese people and it last for a quarter-century before Indonesia recognized East Timor's independence following Suharto's fall in 2000. On the right, Whitlam was criticized for increasing the country's debt even as the economy began to slow for the first time since the end of the war.
In 1977, voters denied Whitlam's attempt for a third term and the coalition returned to power under Malcolm Fraser. Fraser would be the first prime minister to really deal with an increasingly multicultural Australia and indeed opened Australia's doors for the "Boat People"- refugees fleeing from the former South Vietnam following the unification of Vietnam under the communist North. On foreign policy, he consistently followed Washington's line, committing Australian troops to the intervention in Iran. However, his economic policies, especially his focus on a "state's rights" approach compared to Whitlam's activist one, did little to solve the shaky economy that he inherited from Whitlam and by 1981, Australia entered a recession.
In 1983, Labor returned with a vengeance under Bill Hayden. Hayden, a much more conciliatory and moderate leader than Whitlam, oversaw Australia's recovery from the early 1980s recession as well as increasing trade links with Australia's neighbors in southeast Asia as part of making Australia into a "middling" regional power. Hayden also, ironically from a former democratic socialist (as he described his views in the 1960s), marked the Labor Party's shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus to a more neoliberal economic policy, deregulating the financial sector and adopting a strong free trade orientation for Australia as a whole. Hayden oversaw two more victories for Labor and also worked to negotiate a better deal for Australian workers, especially those in trade unions.
By 1990, however, Hayden had worn out his welcome and had become unpopular across the country. His deputy Paul Keating eventually forced Hayden to resign and won the election to replace him as Labor leader and prime minister. Keating led a Labor in less than a year from being behind by nearly ten points in the polls to winning a slim majority in the 1992 elections in spite of the Australian economy again dipping back into recession. Keating would continue previous Labor government's efforts to help the Aboriginal community by reforming Aboriginal land title law and increased benefits for low-income parents of dependent children.
List of Prime Ministers of Australia
The Keating ministry also marked the high-water point of republicanism in Australia, as the cultural shift that had occurred post-war collided with the very public and sordid divorce of Prince Charles and his wife, Princess Jane (formerly Lady Jane Wellesley) to make conditions acceptable for Keating to propose a referendum on whether Australia should become a republic, if Labor should win a fifth consecutive term.
Liberal leader Peter Costello, who had risen rapidly through the ranks to become opposition leader at age 35, undercut Keating by promising a similar referendum if the Coalition were elected and pointing to the economic decline that Keating had done little to combat. The 1995 election saw the Coalition win a one-seat majority and Costello became prime minister at 37 (the second-youngest in Australian history behind Chris Watson who became prime minister less than a month after turning 37).
Costello, in the view of many Australian political observers, became prime minister too soon into his political career than he should have been. While talented and having the skills to successfully run the country (as his service in subsequent Coalition ministries showed), he lacked the necessary experience to keep his party in line while retaining their confidence. As such, the Costello ministry very quickly found itself relying on independents to survive as the party's majority dissipated following by-election losses and party-switchings. Costello's government passed a deficit reduction plan and pushed through comprehensive gun control measures following a series of spree shootings at Australian schools, but for the most part, Costello found himself unable to pass most of his manifesto legislation as a result of him not having a majority.
It was no wonder that voters chose to return to Labor in 1997 under Kim Beazley. Beazley was prime minister when Australia had its republican referendum and was the third straight prime minister to openly voice his support for a republic while in office. Nevertheless, the option the republican campaign had chosen for how to appoint a President of Australia if ratified (namely the prime minister and leader of the opposition picked a candidate who would be voted on by parliament and which also allowed the president to be prematurely dismissed by the prime minister) dissatisfied both progressive republicans (who wished for a directly-elected president) and conservative ones (who would effectively keep the governor-general system only with the title being changed) and led to the referendum's defeat.
Beazley's ministry would see Australia's military forces being used first in the Congo and again in East Timor. Following Suharto's overthrow in 2000, Australia provided the bulk of troops for UNAMET (United Nations Mission in East Timor)'s peacekeeping mission following the collapse of the interim government in the former Portuguese colony. Unfortunately for the prime minister, Australia's successful interventions abroad did not distract voters from factional infighting that begun to envelop the Labor frontbench that the prime minister seemed unable to quell. Added with voters beginning to sour on Beazley, this understandably led to Labor being tossed out in 2003.
Beazley's successor, Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull, spent his first term tinkering at the margins of economic policy, attempting to tighten the belt of several means-tested federal aid programs and reducing business tax rates. The main debate of the Turnbull era was over immigration. The government introduced legislation that it said aimed at keeping too many "boat people" from southeast Asia to land in Australia, which critics felt appealed to xenophobic fears and racial prejudices. Fighting between Turnbull and former prime minister Costello, who had become Turnbull's Minister for Foreign Affairs also began to dominate news coverage as Turnbull's first term ended and caused enough voters to waver about giving the Coalition enough preferences to end up with a hung parliament.
Turnbull remained prime minister, as the Coalition had a plurality of seats in the House of Representatives, but it wasn't long before it became clear that the situation was untenable and another election was called for mid-2007. Labor had had plenty of time to regroup, while Turnbull had been busy finally ending Costello as a player in Liberal circles, culminating in the former prime minister announcing that he would stand down in the election, giving Turnbull undisputed control over the party. This would come too soon, as Labor had already garnered enough support to win the election handily.
New Prime Minister Kim Carr, the first prime minister with facial hair in almost a century, was the most left-wing prime minister since Whitlam. Carr's government saw Australia recognize same-sex marriage on the federal level, but let each state or territory decide whether to legalize it or not and raised income tax rates for the first time since the Hayden ministry to pay for an increase in federal aid programs. However, Carr faced consistent challenges within his own caucus and the prime minister spent almost as much time trying to appease his caucus as he did governing. The right-wing of the Labor Party notably killed the government's attempt at a carbon tax and soon, Labor's dirty laundry was aired when a disgruntled staffer leaked internal party e-mails to the press, which instigated a firestorm of controversy.
Carr's government, damaged by the email leak, party infighting and growing opposition to further reforms, was handily dispatched by the Coalition in 2010. Julie Bishop, leader of the Liberals, became Australia's first female prime minister. The new prime minister tightened immigration policies that the Labor government had weakened, which only reignited the arguments over whether the policy had unsavory racial undertones. Bishop's term was not to be an easy one, as her government replaced several environmental laws with weaker substitutes, angering environmentalists and environmentally-oriented allies like Canada. Issues from the prime minister's past, including her associations with a man later jailed for defrauding the government, came back to bite Bishop and 2016 saw her narrowly lose her bid for a second term.
New prime minister Bill Shorten has proven popular with the Labor base, but his efforts at finding a way forward with environmental reform, immigration, and stagnant job growth have not met with much success in his first year of office...
