Australian Politics

Robert Menzies retired as prime minister more than fifty-three years ago and died in 1978, yet he remains not just a dominant figure in Australian political history but a strong influence on modern political affairs. As Zachary Gorman, editor of this latest book on Menzies, argues, ‘it has become almost a cliché to say that he built or at least shaped and moulded modern Australia’. He created the Liberal Party that has governed Australia for fifty of the past seventy-three years, and modern Liberal politicians still draw on Menzies’ ideals.

In Unmaking Angas Downs, researcher and writer Shannyn Palmer seeks to understand why a derelict pastoral station in Central Australia, once a hub for First Nations people and a popular tourist destination en route to Watarrka Kings Canyon, was abandoned. Established by white pastoralist Bill Liddle in the late 1920s, Angas Downs is 300 kilometres south-west of Mparntwe Alice Springs at a place known as Walara to Anangu. Curious about the shifting fortunes of Angas Downs, Palmer travels to Walara to uncover the ‘histories that are obscured by the single, fixed idea of the pastoral station’.

One of the by-products of every election is the instant analysis, often in the form of small books that read like extended newspaper articles. The success of the teals at the 2022 federal election has already produced extensive speculation about whether this signals a sea change in Australian politics.

Luck has always been a potent force in politics, good and bad, but for Scott Morrison, Australia’s thirtieth prime minister, it almost single-handedly drove his unheralded ascent. 

When the Howard government committed Australian troops to fight in Afghanistan in 2001, and later in Iraq, it did so without recourse to parliament or the courts. Not only can the prime minister sanction the despatch of the nation’s forces to fight overseas, he or she has no need of parliamentary approval. Indeed, there is no requirement to debate such a proposal before a decision is made. Australia has no equivalent of the US War Powers Resolution of 1973, which limits the president’s freedom to make war. 

'I am very annoyed and disgusted with the discrimination, prejudice, ridicule and scorn, with possible disgrace and ruin of my reputation, and good name, if my family, friends, associates and colleagues ever discovered that I express my ‘feminine personality’ by dressing completely as a woman. And yet, because of my ‘feminine personality’ I consider myself to be more compassionate, more understanding, and certainly more relaxed and happy, than the average male.’ Thus wrote the president of a group of heterosexual transvestites to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships.

Early in their new book, Victory, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington pose a simple question that has haunted Labor since 2019: why couldn’t they beat the other mob? After all, their foe was an ‘incoherent’ and ‘second-rate’ government that had accelerated graft, cynicism, and factional cannibalism, and that had produced, in the end, a long list of tawdry failures. The Coalition seemed entropic.