Tag Archives: Australia

Unions in from the cold

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Australians’ strong opposition to trade unions has changed to mild approval, according to research that says trade unions have “come in from the cold” as political actors.

Over the past 15 years of employment turmoil and industrial restructuring, the number of people who believe unions have too much power has almost halved, from 82 per cent in 1984 to 43 per cent in 1999.

The number of people who believe unions are doing a terrible job or no good at all has dropped from 33 per cent (1987) to 14 per cent (1999).

And 53 per cent believe unions are doing a fairly good, very good or excellent job.

The strongest pro-union attitudes are among top government employees and, in a demographic turnaround, young people have become more sympathetic than older people to trade unions.

Researchers Jonathan Kelley and Mariah Evans have analysed the responses of 1732 people to the 1999-2000 International Social Science Survey Australia.

Their findings have been published across two editions of Australian Social Monitor, the journal of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. The researchers wrote: “Australians have not come to laud trade unions as public-spirited organisations (top ratings remain rare) but many fewer anathematise them as doing a `terrible’ job’.”

This week’s Social Monitor suggests that very high-status government employees such as judges and bureaucratic mandarins might be unusually pro-union because “the absence of a market and of external validation of productivity is a great difficulty for these employees – it enables their bosses to accelerate or stunt their careers on the basis of personal feelings … and offers no curb to envy and spite”.

But junior government workers were not as pro-union as their equivalents in the private sector.

Within the private sector, those who worked for non-profit bodies were more pro-union than those who worked for commercial organisations. The strongest influence on a person’s union attitude remained their parents’ politics.

There was a slight tendency for more-educated people to regard unions more favorably. And young people were significantly more likely than those aged 50 and over to view unions in a positive or neutral light.

An associate professor in management at Monash University, Julian Teicher, said this finding differed from previous studies.

“Historically, most other surveys have suggested that support for unions is strongest in the 45-55 age group,” he said. “This makes you wonder whether unions have had some success in marketing to this younger age group.”

But the remaining findings confirm earlier research that suggested there was a change in public attitudes, Dr Teicher said.

One study found that, “even among those who don’t belong to unions, the majority would have wished to belong to a union”.

First published in The Age.

Win some, lose some: the aftermath of the Kennett Express

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IT HIT Bernie Finn in a few brutal seconds. He was watching television on the night of the state election last September. It showed three columns representing the status of seats: In Doubt, Cliffhangers and Gone.

“All of a sudden, my name appeared on the Cliffhangers,” remembers Finn, then a backbench Liberal MP for Tullamarine. “Within 45 seconds it had moved from Cliffhangers to Gone. I’ve been in a car accident, and it was almost that quick. I was absolutely stunned.”

For the rest of the Victoria, the fall of the Kennett government was merely the biggest political story of the year. For those riding the apparently invincible Kennett express, the derailment was a personal as well as a political cataclysm: most unexpectedly, they were out of a job.

This might have triggered some mirthless glee among those who had preceded them into the unemployment market as a result of the government’s massive public service cuts, or among those working longer hours for less reward as a result of its deregulation of industrial relations. But, schadenfreude aside, how did those ejected from the system manage to put their lives back together? Where do political beasties seek refuge after a mauling, and are their links to a fallen government a help or a hindrance?

Most of the big guns – the former premier and his ministers – are accounted for. Jeff Kennett has his part-time but high-profile commitment to the Institute of Depression and last week was reported to have spent $1.4million on a Richmond office block as the intended headquarters of a new company.

Former health minister Rob Knowles is now with the Macquarie Bank (as is ex-treasurer Alan Stockdale). Former education minister Phil Gude, who announced his retirement 12 months before the election, has been ill for several months after three bouts of surgery. But he is now back at work in “strategic communications” and property development, as well as being chairman of Connex Trains.

But several of the former MPs and staff members contacted for this story spent several months “having a holiday” after the election, perhaps the equivalent of an actor’s “resting between engagements”. Some are only now beginning to move back into paid work and, if their career plans were to have a common thread, it would be that amorphous word “consultant”.

Finn was a feisty rebel MP known for two things: beating Labor’s David White in the 1996 state poll and standing up to Kennett in the Liberals’ party room. The latter got him kicked in the head on a good day, he says dryly now, “and if he was in a bad mood, it was a bit lower down”.

Finn, who worked in radio before entering politics, is one of those who have been resting and catching up with friends and relatives for much of the year since the election. He says he was shocked and grieved – not to mention angry – for some time after the loss. He had been concerned that problems were looming for two years because of Kennett’s increasing autocracy as premier. “I’m still convinced to this day that if Jeff had kept his promise to retire at 50, we would still be in government.”

Finn believes he won his seat initially by campaigning on local issues, but last September, he says, “we weren’t allowed to do that. We tried, but at the end of the day the party’s campaign was so Jeff-centred that it just engulfed everything”.

Losing his seat “basically closed the chapter on seven years of my life”, says Finn. “It was very, very painful and very distressing. On a personal level it took quite a toll.”

Packing up the office was awful. “It’s almost like when you lose a close one; you really don’t want to go and organise the funeral, but you have to.”

Finn, 39, now has more time with his wife and two-year-old daughter and has set up Finn Communications, a political and media consultancy. “I’m enjoying it. It’s very different to what I was used to, but perhaps it was time for a change.”

Finn says it is paradoxical that voters who wanted to oust Kennett in the process ousted most of the MPs who had tried to moderate his policies. Stephen Elder, who held the seat of Ripon (formerly Ballarat North), had been one of these dissenters, staunchly advocating decentralisation policies and infrastructure projects to reverse population decline in the country.

Elder is a great-nephew of former Liberal premier Henry Bolte and, while he never became a minister under Kennett, had been viewed as a long-term potential leader. The state parliamentary secretary for education for seven years, Elder is now an adviser to federal Education Minister David Kemp.

“I was offered many chances to go into private enterprise or government or semi-government, but I chose this job because I would still be involved in education,” Elder says. “Education shapes the type of community you are going to have; it shapes values, it’s the ticket for many working-class kids to a better life.”

Elder says he was lobbied hard to stand for Kennett’s former seat of Burwood but refused because he wanted to stay in Ballarat, a desire that ruled out many other job offers. (In the late 1980s Elder twice defeated the current Premier, Steve Bracks, for the seat of Ballarat North.)

Of his future, Elder says federal politics would be too hard to combine with family life, and a return to state politics is unlikely. “Time will tell, and I don’t have politics completely out of my system, but the further away we get from last year’s election, the less inclined I will be to ever return to it.

“You realise the demands that politics places on you, that the most important things in your life are your wife and your kids, and that you can be financially better off and still have a fulfilling life.”

He is philosophical about the way he was overlooked for the ministry. “If I’d been a sycophant, then outcomes for me would have been better than they were. At the end of the day, my personal ambitions weren’t as great as my ambition to do good for my community. But I stayed true to myself, and I am very proud of that.”

One of Elder’s friends on the middle benches was Michael John, who was the member for Bendigo East and had been community services minister in the government’s first term. He lost despite the fact, he says, that Bendigo “had never had it so good”, with unemployment down and injections of money into the local TAFE and a new, Olympic-standard athletics track. He was shocked that half an hour after returns began coming in, he was out. “I kept scratching my head and thinking, `Of all the elections to lose!”‘

John had no escape route planned, but had kept his lawyer’s practising certificate up to date since entering politics in 1985. He refused an offer to join the bar through a Melbourne friend’s practice – “I’m 57 now, and felt that I was perhaps a bit too old to start on that” – and now works part-time with a legal firm in Bendigo.

He says the first six months of “holidays” before he started work again were testing. “I think it’s fair to say that I got under my wife’s feet, being around all day.”

Mind you, he got under her skin at times when he was the minister slashing $80million from community services. His wife works with the disabled in an adult training centre, which would have made for some full and frank exchanges of pillow talk. Did it cause marital discord? John laughs. “What do you think? As for when we cut the 17.5per cent leave loading – I almost got divorced over that one!”

When he’s not practising law, John is catching up on the years of gardening and reading for pleasure – including biographies of Winston Churchill and Michael Caine – that he missed.

Two country MPs who have not stayed close to home “after the fall” are Florian Andrighetto, the former member for Narracan, and Barry Traynor, who held Ballarat East. Both have returned to police careers in Melbourne. Victorian law allows them to re-enter the force after a term in parliament.

Traynor is a senior sergeant in the strategic planning unit and Andrighetto is a sergeant in the ethical standards department. Neither wished to comment further.

In the weeks after the initially uncertain election result, Kennett’s media director, Steve Murphy, encouraged the ministers’ 45 staff members – “valiant foot soldiers and lieutenants” – to line up other work in case the independents gave government to Labor. They all eventually found jobs, Murphy says, “although whether they are all doing things they really want to do, I wouldn’t know”.

He says that four months after the election: “I said to Mr Kennett one week: `There’s only two people unemployed now.’ He said, `Who?’ I said: `You and me.”‘

Murphy looks bemused: “Go figure.”

It’s not all that hard to figure. Murphy had a close relationship with Kennett, and the prospects of both were presumably tainted by the massive political defeat. The change of government also meant that Murphy and other staff members no longer had any connections with an incumbent administration to enhance their marketability as lobbyists and publicists in the private sector.

Says one staff member, who did not wish to be named: “Our career structure is probably different to Labor, where they tend to get re-absorbed back into the political structure. They return to local government or the trade unions; there’s also a career path where they go from advisers to MPs. For the ex-Kennett people, there was no one clear path of disengagement.”

Many of the “Kennett refugees”, as Kennett’s former chief of staff, Anna Cronin, calls them, are now in Canberra, where Cronin is a lobbyist with consultants Parker and Partners. Her fellow “exiles” include Serena Williams, who worked with Rob Knowles and is now with federal Health Minister Michael Wooldridge; Tony Cudmore, now assistant director of the Australian Institute of Petroleum; Juliana Stackpole, senior adviser to
Environment Minister Robert Hill; Genevieve Atkinson, press secretary to Aged Care Minister Bronwyn Bishop; and former economic adviser Michael Brennan, now with Senator Kemp.

Cronin professes herself disappointed but unfazed by the election upset. She had already resigned, knowing she had to move to Canberra because of illness in her family. In any case, says Cronin, she is used to political setbacks; she was an adviser to Andrew Peacock and John Hewson, who also lost an “unloseable” election. “You get steeled to it.”

But most of her staff “were totally shell-shocked; they thought Jeff was infallible”.

Asked if election night was a shock, Murphy says laconically: “Yeah. It was a bit like the Toyota ad, really – `Oh, bugger!”‘

But he insists he had already decided to leave his job, and the election robbed him only of the ability to decide his own timing.

Was the former government’s famed good relationship with business of any use to Murphy or his staff? “To a degree,” he says cautiously. “But you can’t just pick up the phone and say: `I’ve got half a dozen blokes here; employ them!’ If you had someone with the right set of skills for a particular job, it does help.”

Another former Liberal press secretary, Ian Smith, left that job in 1995 to run the Melbourne operation of the public affairs and finance consultancy, Gavin Anderson and Co. He employs four former Kennett staff members – James Tonkin, Mark Triffitt, Tanya Price and the only one to have been with the government at the bitter end, Stockdale’s former chief of staff, Nick Maher.

Murphy himself had three months off after the election before taking on some consultancy work with an interstate company.

He is still “exploring other options”, a phrase also employed by the Liberals’ state director, Peter Poggioli. It was recently announced that Poggioli would not renew his contract, a decision he says was made months before the election.

Formerly a professional historian specialising in mediaeval and renaissance politics, Poggioli, 50, says a return to academe is unlikely and he hopes to find a niche in the private sector.

One of Murphy’s options has been a new venture with a company called Shoutitout, of which he is a director and Kennett is chairman. Murphy refuses to confirm or deny reports that the company will focus on publicity, public relations and e-commerce.

“There’s really no detail that I want to divulge about it at this stage. The only thing I am prepared to tell you is that it’s an idea we had been chewing on and developing for some months.”

Murphy denies rumors that he is writing an insider’s book about the Kennett era but admits he is compiling into some sort of order, for his own use, the detailed daily diary entries he made in that time.

Is it therapy? He looks appalled. “I wouldn’t use the word therapy! But am I doing it with the motivation of having it printed or published? I’m not. I don’t believe in kissing and telling.”

Now there’s a pity.

First published in The Age.

Was the blokes’ republic a turn-off for women?

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Did more women than men vote no to the republic – and if so, why?

Polling before the referendum showed several divides: yes voters were more likely to be younger than older, Labor than Liberal, urban than rural and well-off rather than struggling.

But one of the most consistent divides was around gender, with polls reporting that the number of women supporting the republic plan lagged about 10 percentage points behind men.

The Labor Party president, Mr Barry Jones, says election results suggest that women generally put a higher premium than men on the concept of security, “that is, hanging on to the known”.

Women also tend to be less attracted than men to themes of separation, independence and self-reliance, according to the historian Professor Marilyn Lake.

This might translate into less enthusiasm for “cutting the apron strings” from the mother country.

Social researcher Mr Hugh Mackay says he would have accepted that explanation 30 years ago but today’s women are much more independent. He believes the predicted gender gap was the result of more women than men resenting the way the referendum process was handled.

“One of the standard things said about gender difference is that men are more interested in outcomes, and women are more interested in process,” he says. “(It’s) an analogy for sexual foreplay, in a way: the male just wants to get on with it, and the female wants to be romanced and gentled into it.

“The (referendum) process was so rushed that there was a sense of being hustled along, and I think women intuitively felt the process wasn’t getting the proper attention, that we jumped straight to one model with no real public debate.

“It was men who were typically saying, `It may not be the model you want but nothing’s perfect. Let’s just do it’.”

Mr Mackay says women are also more likely than men to favor Mr John Howard as preferred Prime Minister, and therefore his stand.

Former Victorian Labor Premier Joan Kirner agrees that “blokes like just to get on with the decision” but says: “The research we have done for Emily’s List on elections indicates that women are far more likely to make a positive decision around issues that affect what the pollsters call `the details of their lives’.

“If matters don’t affect the details of their lives – and they don’t regard the republic as doing that – they will either be dismissive or vote against it.”

The deputy leader of the Victorian Opposition, Ms Louise Asher, suspects that the pressure of women’s lives militated against their positive involvement: “Most are incredibly busy trying to juggle triple roles. In the end, this was not going to impact on their economic wellbeing, it wasn’t going to buy them more time, and I don’t think anyone in Australia – putting aside the question of the monarchy – thinks the current system is actually disadvantageous.”

But there is evidence that women do care about Australia’s future identity. Says Mrs Kirner, “When I did consultations around Australia for the centenary of federation report for Keating in 1994, we had droves of women coming up to talk to us about the kind of Australia they wanted to see, their desire for reconciliation between black and white, and their pride in the country.

“It’s not that they are not interested in these issues as such, but they have got to be reflected in people-type terms.”

Mrs Kirner is critical of the Sydney-dominated yes campaign for failing to take ordinary women with it: “I said to the republican movement five years ago that … we needed to have community consultations with women, but it wasn’t the Sydney style. They had lunches and dinners, more formal functions rather than a community process.”

She suspects women were also alienated by the campaign’s blokiness. “If we had got more people like Hazel Hawke and Nova Peris-Kneebone out on the ground as part of a proper deliberative process, we would have done better.

“The last two weeks of the campaign was almost entirely dominated on the republican side by the faces of men. I thought if I saw another face of a bloke over 50 I would scream.

“When the coup de grace was supposed to be Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam saying `It’s time’, I could just see women in the kitchen saying, `Yeah, it’s time to get the bloody dinner’!”

Rather more mortifying for women is the possibility that any gap could be explained by their greater political ignorance. Dr Pamela Ryan, managing director of Issues Deliberation Australia, oversaw a “people’s constitutional convention” in which 380 voters debated the issues with leaders of both sides of the republic debate.

She says that among the voters, “Women had lower levels of political knowledge than men, and that can often motivate a no vote.”

At the start of the debate only 33 per cent of the women, compared with 47 per cent of the men, knew that the role of the proposed president was like that of the current Governor-General. Ten per cent of women (22 per cent of men) had known that the prime minister could remove the president with the approval of the House of Representatives.

But here’s the rub: in this group, that ignorance did not translate into a marked gender gap, with support for the yes vote at the beginning of the debate running at 50 per cent for men and 48 per cent for women.

First published in The Age.

The fall of Kennett: from realpolitik to real politics

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THE WORDS “authoritarian” and “Victorian” were a natural pairing long before Jeff Kennett came to embody them in his premiership. He ran the state the way a Victorian-era papa ran his family: rigidly, with no questioning tolerated, no challenge unpunished.

Papa knew best and, for Kennett, anyone who did not accept so was “un-Victorian”. What will Victoria be like with Papa gone?

There will certainly be less political invective to amuse us, but perhaps Steve Bracks’ excited malapropisms will help compensate. He talked at a press conference this week of “garnishing support”, as if he planned to adorn his backers with sprigs of parsley. Decent he may be; smooth he ain’t, at least not yet.

Televisually, Kennett won this week’s performances. He wore better suits than Bracks. He was articulate, assured, and at times graceful (in the athletic sense of the precision with which he aimed rhetorical kicks at various heads during his exit speech).

He continued the smooth sell of what he saw as his Government’s achievements right up to the death knock. This, too, was “Victorian” in the historic sense; that era valued oratory highly, and its middle and upper classes expended a lot of energy on preserving face in public.

Bracks-the-giant-killer is not a traditional papa. He makes quiet, dogged points rather than sweeping pronouncements. He talks about wanting to take people with him. He’s more like a 1990s dad: authoritative rather than authoritarian, trying to balance everyone’s needs, willing to admit he doesn’t know it all but promising that he’s open to learning.

These are not just differences of style. They stem from differences of substance. They point to the way dogmatic realpolitik in this state is about to be replaced by real politics, involving public debate and negotiation and compromise. It will be messier and more uncertain than what has gone before, but it should be more open to human values and – dare I say it? – idealism.

Kennett was not entirely lacking in either. He spared us some of the most socially damaging aspects of the neo-liberal agenda. While he was aggressive and uncompromising about economic policy, he did not inflict on us the punitive preoccupation with “traditional family values” of many of America’s conservative leaders.

He also broke with the traditional right in his passionate support of multiculturalism and immigration and his dislike and condemnation of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation policies. He understood the importance of social cohesion around these issues, and his stance made the lives of many ethnic Victorians a little easier.

But his attempts to run the state as a corporation rather than as a community amounted to an economic experiment that went too far, untrammelled by the oversight of an ethics committee.

The first rule of ethical scientific experimentation is that subjects used in it must not be injured by it. Kennett did not ensure this for many of the Victorians – particularly those in the bush – whose loyalty he demanded throughout the turmoil of his massive downsizings, privatisations and cuts to services.

The second rule of ethical experimentation is that subjects give informed consent to the processes they are about to undergo. Victorians were not warned of the extent of Kennett’s planned revolution before he was elected to Government and, during his premiership, polls indicated that many people opposed privatisation of public utilities and were concerned about the resourcing of schools and hospitals.

For those who loathed him, and they are many, Kennett’s collapse is akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is relief and exhilaration that this huge and apparently insurmountable symbol of division is no more. But, like the German Government, the incoming Labor administration faces a long, hard struggle to rebuild.

Most urgently in need of renovation is the current dispirited belief that we cannot afford to look after each other any more; that economic responsibility necessarily means turfing new mothers out of hospital too early, leaving old people waiting on casualty trolleys and jamming children into overcrowded schools. Economic “success” should not require that we live with two Victorias, one booming and the other a resentful underclass.

Kennett has changed the political landscape in a way that makes it essential for future Labor governments to address fiscal responsibilities. It is up to Bracks to change the political landscape in a way that makes it essential for future Liberal governments to address social responsibilities.

Forget “un-Victorian”. The notion that decency is too expensive is un-Australian.

First published in The Age.

Obey? Sophie, how could you!

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SHE doesn’t expect anyone to believe she means it, of course. That’s because she doesn’t mean it herself. When Sophie Rhys-Jones vows to “obey” Prince Edward tomorrow, she doesn’t mean that she will do what he says.

She patiently explained to a TV interviewer this week, tying herself in Jesuitical knots, that obeying one’s husband does not mean doing exactly what one is told. When she says “obey”, what she really means is “trust”. Thus, she will “trust” Edward to make all the important decisions affecting their life together.

Come off the grass, girlie.

Is this the supposedly savvy career girl? It could well be her royal mutation. Rumor has it that Prince Philip, jack of tempestuous young women who don’t know their place, insisted the word be reinstated in the royal marriage service (the 19-year-old Diana had enough spirit to refuse to say it at hers).

Perhaps Sophie is making a strategic decision to keep the old duke happy for the sake of a harmonious future in the “family firm” (if it’s not an oxymoron to pair the idea of family harmony with the Windsors).

Perhaps it is her way of showing that she’s going to be a good girl, a nice princess, not a troublemaker like Diana or Fergie. Perhaps she needs the biddable, demure front even more now that her naked breast has appeared below her laughing face in a London tabloid.

On the other hand, maybe she’s gormless enough to actually want to say it. Maybe under all that apparent self-assurance there’s just another lost little girl looking for a daddy to whom she can hand over responsibility for her life; a passive princess. Maybe she’s found another little boy who thinks manliness is about dominance and privilege. There’s a lot of it about.

In a marriage of commoners, it would be a private matter for the couple. But the Windsors are a dynasty. Monarchists tell us the royal family is important not so much for its component parts, which have proved regrettably flawed, but for its symbolism. It is supposed to embody, on our behalf, deeply held values.

It does, and some of them are very ugly indeed. The notion that hereditary privilege should be protected and maintained no matter the cost to the individual is one.

Years ago, long before Diana died, it was reported that Charles’ mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, had helped choose Diana to be the royal brood mare. Diana’s youth and seeming shyness made her the perfect candidate for a marriage in which she was to be a dupe. Her personal happiness was secondary to the need to ensure the succession. The fact that she would live a life of privilege was presumed to make the Faustian arrangement a fair trade.

My husband looked up from reading that report and said: “The last ritual sacrifice of a virgin was Lady Diana Spencer on the altar of St Paul’s Cathedral.”

Sophie is not Diana. She is older and shrewder; she’s been around. Perhaps she’ll say “obey” and give them merry hell anyway (one can only hope).

But the Windsors’ attitude to marriage is a metaphor for their attitude to the world. They remain steeped in the notion that respect is not something to be earned but something to which one is born (or not born, in Sophie’s case). They actually seem to believe that the genetic accidents of “nobility” and maleness endow the right to call the shots in other people’s lives.

True nobility – nobleness of mind or character, as opposed to mere social class – might justify such a prerogative, although true nobility would also bring a disinclination to use it. A genuinely noble person would recognise others’ rights, respect their autonomy, and understand that one person’s social standing and material wellbeing should not be based on the subjection or disadvantage of others.

Of course, it’s not in the royals’ interests to do that, and even the one who chooses to call himself plain old Edward Windsor still goes along with the hierarchical games when it suits him. But any man who wants his wife to kowtow to him in front of the whole world fails a modern test of princeliness.

It’s not in our interests to indulge the Windsors’ time-warp fantasies. It’s been a long time since the British royal family stood for anything with which a more sophisticated, egalitarian, multicultural Australia could identify; when Sophie says “obey” tomorrow, it will just be another reminder of that.

Let’s hope any resulting public distaste helps to ensure that our republic referendum does not end in Australia making a Sophie’s choice.

First published in The Age.

Still they call Australia home

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Many naturalised migrants who regard themselves as “dinky-di” are pained that a High Court ruling has turned them into second-class citizens unable to stand for Parliament, writes Karen Kissane.

JOHN DELACRETAZ took his Australianness, wrapped it around a rock and lobbed it through a window at the High Court of Australia – figuratively speaking. He had been born in Switzerland, a country that would always have a place in his heart, but he and his wife, his multi-million-dollar business and two younger generations of his family had been firmly planted in Australia for decades. Long before he and his wife took out citizenship in 1960, “We were already Australian by heart; Australian by fait accompli.”
The High Court, he says, took that away from him, turning him and many other naturalised migrants into second-class citizens. In 1992, the court ruled that the Constitution forbade anyone who held dual citizenship to stand for Federal Parliament. Mr Delacretaz, who had been the Liberal candidate for Wills, would have to renounce all connection to Switzerland if he wished to stand again. Instead he wrote an angry letter to the High Court renouncing his Australian citizenship.

“It was sad, but what could I do?” he asks. “I was furious. I was Australian! It was a slap in the face to say: `You have to send a letter to your mother saying you are no longer her son.’ I wouldn’t have it. I was very hurt.” In his letter he wrote, “If I had known in 1960 that one day I would be branded a second-class citizen, I would never have accepted Australian citizenship. My conscience and my honor oblige me to cancel. Neither the certificate nor the passport are true to name (or) worth the paper they are written on.” He was certain that the Mayor of Coburg, who had presided over his naturalisation, and the migrants who had shared it with him had not known of “the fine print lost under the dust of the Constitution”.

The “fine print” was section 44(i) of the Constitution, and the way it was interpreted by the High Court sent politicians of all parties scurrying to check their citizenship status for fear of losing their seats. The section says that “any person who is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power” cannot enter Parliament. In some ethnic groups, even second-generation Australians are affected: many nations still recognise as citizens not just their native-born who migrated to Australia, but those migrants’ children and grandchildren as well.

The High Court made the citizenship judgment in the Cleary case, where it found the election of independent Phil Cleary to the seat of Wills to be void because, as a teacher, he held an office of profit under the Crown, making him ineligible to stand. The court said that the seat could not be filled by a recount of votes because the other two main candidates – Mr Delacretaz and the ALP’s Bill Kardamitsis – were ineligible because they had not taken “all reasonable steps” to renounce their other citizenships.

The finding enraged many migrants and the High Court was accused of “ethnic cleansing” of the Australian political system. Naturalised Australians were confused: what does it take to prove loyalty to this country, to become truly Australian? Is it right that a higher proof of loyalty be demanded of MPs than of others? The judges themselves were divided about this; two considered that Mr Kardamitsis and Mr Delacretaz had taken “all reasonable steps” when they made oaths of allegiance and renunciation at their naturalisations. The majority verdict, however, held that they were required to write to their countries of origin, formally renouncing any citizenship rights.

Citizenship is in the eye of the bestower. Nations decide whom they consider their citizens, and some can be reluctant to accept renunciations. Says an exasperated Mr Kardamitsis, who was born in Greece but became an Australian citizen in 1973: “Am I supposed to take up arms and go and shoot all the parliamentarians in Greece and ask them to change their Constitution? The fact that the Greek Government wants to recognise me as one of their citizens is their problem. I can’t help it. It’s got nothing to do with me. And there’s no way Australia can impose on other countries to change their constitutions to suit us.” Mr Kardamitsis wrote his letter to the Greek Government and received no reply, but, according to the High Court ruling, he does not need evidence that his renunciation was accepted, only that it was made.

At one stage it was thought the Labor Party’s Theophanous brothers, Andrew and Theo, might be up for three renunciations: the Cyprus in which they were born, and the Greece and Turkey that claimed its territory. As it turned out, they were safe because they had emigrated while it was still under British rule. But, says Theo Theophanous, Leader of the Opposition in Victoria’s upper house: “It seems to me absurd that we in Australia should rely on what another country does in relation to its citizens in order to determine whether they qualify for citizenship rights in this country.”
The points on which such issues turn can be ludicrously fine. Greens senator Christabel Chamarette was born in India of British parents and came to Australia when she was four. Her post-Cleary inquiries elicited that her status depended on whether her father, who had been a doctor, had worked in private practice in India or in British Government service. Because he had worked privately, she did not have dual citizenship.

The Western Australian Labor backbencher Graeme Campbell forfeited his British citizenship, despite his belief that it was not a problem – “At the time the Constitution was written, we were all British citizens” – because he had no time for a court
battle before the last election.

Labor senator Jim McKiernan, who was naturalised in 1978, found it “very, very hard” to renounce his Irish citizenship. “I felt like I was tearing up and shedding my roots,” he says. “Really, in retrospect, it doesn’t make any difference. It hasn’t changed my accent. It hasn’t changed the fact that I was born and spent 16 years in that country. But now, I can’t go into the country where I was born and enjoy its citizenship rights.”
The Cleary case merely drove home what several review bodies had already pointed out. A Senate standing committee, a constitutional commission and a constitutional convention had all expressed concern about the potential consequences of enforcing section 44(i), according to Geoff Lindell, a reader in constitutional law at Melbourne University.

In the 1980s the Senate standing committee on legal and constitutional affairs recommended that the provision be abolished and replaced with a statutory requirement that candidates make a declaration about whether they held dual citizenship and, if so, what steps they had taken to renounce it. The committee believed that candidates who refused to take such steps should not be automatically disqualified, and that it should be left to voters to decide on their suitability.

But any change to section 44, Mr Lindell says, would require a constitutional referendum.

The provision was designed by a white colonial Australia to try to protect the nation from subversive intervention by foreign powers.

Today, says Cheryl Saunders, professor of law at Melbourne University, “the really interesting question is whether this is still a sensible policy. My own view is that it’s going to become increasingly difficult to sustain. As people move around the world more, and while the citizenship laws of different countries remain so different, I think we will find it necessary to relax this.”
If change does come, it will not be soon. The Opposition, the Government and the Democrats have no policy on the issue and no plans for a referendum. A spokesman for the Attorney-General, Mr Lavarch, says: “It may be the sort of thing that might be considered as a consequence of the republic process, but for the time being it’s not a live one.” In the short term, at least, candidates will have to comply or bow out. But while it may be a matter of indifference to mainstream politicians, the issue is hotly debated in ethnic communities.

It is not as if loyalty to the old country negates loyalty to the new, says John Delacretaz – they exist together. He points to his involvement in the Australian community – the local church, the chamber of commerce, 22 years in the Rotary Club of Coburg – and says: “We have done a lot of things for Australia. And our true nationality is where our children are born, much more than with the land of our ancestors. But we should not have to lose our heritage; we are all very proud of our ancestry. I heard the former minister, Mr Kerin, say he was proud of being a descendant of convicts. We are all proud, wherever we come from.”

First published in The Age.

A new Australian herstory

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Karen Kissane reports on a new history of Australia that, for the first time, interweaves women’s stories with the more familiar yarns of our country’s past.

IN A HOBART factory in the early 1800s, a roomful of women simultaneously turned and slapped their bare bottoms at a sermonising minister. History records their outrageous behavior, but not what sparked it. That is typical of the way history has been written and studied until recently; by men, about men, and from men’s point of view. Women have had little or no place in mainstream history books, and women’s stories, which have only started to be pieced together in the past couple of decades, have largely been confined to texts on women as a group.

This changes with the publication of `Creating A Nation’, a book by four women historians with backgrounds in women’s studies. It is a new mainstream history of Australia that in many ways is quite a traditional narrative, but one in which women’s history is emphasised as much as men’s. The authors believe it to be an international first, with no equivalent in history books about other countries. They hope it will be used as a school and university text, but wonder, too, whether their new entity will fall between the cracks of different disciplines: too mainstream for women’s studies, too feminist for mainstream courses. Either way, laughs co-author Marian Quartly, it will still sit nicely in airport bookshops.

`Creating A Nation’ was written by Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly. It has all the familiar refrains of Australian classrooms _ Aborigines and settlers, governors and prime ministers, labor movements and immigration _ but with new harmonies.

Most histories are based on economics and politics; this one also examines the personal and the social. The writers have explored the links between the private and the public worlds of earlier Australians: the status and effects of marriage and divorce, families and childbearing, and the role of women in the home, in the workplace and in public debate.

“The so-called public/private divide is a fiction,” says Marilyn Lake, associate professor in history and director of women’s studies at La Trobe University. One example, she says, is the way “women’s determination to limit their families in the late 19th and 20th centuries led to a reformulation of public policy on immigration. The three million migrants after World War Two arrived directly as a result of individual, private women’s decisions not to have more children.”
Patricia Grimshaw, professor in history at Melbourne University, says women’s lives have traditionally not been studied because they “appeared not to have been event-driven”; women, it was thought, had had no effect on history and were passive creatures of their times. In fact, she says, women were frequent figures in the public world and have made up at least a third of the paid workforce since industrialisation. “Women had an enormous impact on the Arbitration Commission and the course of unionism, for example, because they constituted a threat to the working man’s conditions because they were forced to take lower wages than men. The shaping of the labor movement in Australia has been based on the existence of women as workers.”
The traditional emphasis on men in Australian history has, they argue, helped create a male mythology about what it is to be Australian.

“When people talk about the typical Australian, people think in terms of masculinity without realising it _ the bushman, the digger,” Marilyn Lake says. “They say `He’s laconic, laid back, tall and fair and gangly’. It’s a shock to hear someone say, `The typical Australian looks good in a bikini and lipstick’.” She finds it ironic that soldiers who fought at Gallipoli were said to have “given birth to the nation”; it was women urged to ever greater efforts to increase the population who literally gave birth to the nation. But it had long been felt that Australia would not win its own identity until it had been blooded; in 1906, long before Gallipoli, one public figure predicted that: “We will never have a true Australian nation until the blood of our sons is shed on the battlefields of Europe.”
But although maleness was to be sacrificed at need, it was to be preserved at all costs from the depredations of female advancement. In 1867, members of Victoria’s Legislative Assembly warned that: “Women’s suffrage would abolish soldiers and war, also racing, hunting, football, cricket and all other manly games”.

The book shows how much has changed, and how little. It seems that political leaders have always decried women’s refusal to devote themselves solely to home and family, at one point accusing them of “race suicide” because of their role in falling birth rates. In 1903, a Royal Commission was set up to investigate the problem and came to conclusions that sound familiar today: that women were having fewer babies because they were unwilling to submit to the strain and worry of children, because they wanted to
avoid the physical discomforts of pregnancy and birth, and because of “a dislike of interference with pleasure and comfort”.

Governments had tried retaliating by restricting sales of contraceptives and information about their use but in NSW, at least, this was stopped by a pungent judgment from the Supreme Court’s Justice Windeyer in 1888. He upheld the right of a free-thought lecturer and bookseller, charged with obscenity, to sell works on “preventatives” such as condoms, cervical caps and soluble pessaries. Such information had until then been the preserve of medical professionals. Ruled Windeyer, “Information cannot be pure, chaste and legal in morocco at a guinea, but impure, obscene and indictable in a paper pamphlet at sixpence.” But news does not seem to have spread fast; by 1935, Melbourne’s Royal Women’s hospital was admitting one woman with septic abortion for every two deliveries.

The female story in `Creating A Nation’ is not, however, confined to women’s noble fight for civil liberties. Women then, as women now, were not a homogeneous group, and some were just as likely to inflict oppression as to suffer it. White women abused black women by scouring their skin with kitchen pads or bathing them in boiling water in futile attempts to get them “clean” _ cleanness being confused with paleness in a society that created “racial hygiene laws”. Women who saw themselves as guardians of public morality, such as Frances Perry, the wife of the first Anglican archbishop of Melbourne, refused single mothers admission to maternity hospitals. Says Marian Quartly, associate professor in history at Monash University: “Middle-class women also oppressed working women, although not with the same viciousness as they did black women.”
Historians are just beginning to come to grips with the need for class and race analysis in any national story; the authors of `Creating A Nation’ hope that this book will make it impossible for others to write history without also examining the effects of gender. One of the stories that opens the book shows how enriching that process can be.

Governor Phillip is introduced through the story of Barangaroo, an Aboriginal woman more senior in her tribe than her husband Bennelong.

Bennelong told Phillip at one point that Barangaroo wanted to give birth to her child at Government House, a place the couple had often visited. Phillip refused, insisting that she would have “better accommodation” at the hospital. “Better accommodation” was not the point; Barangaroo probably wanted to deliver at Government House because birthplace was important in Aboriginal society, allowing a child special association with a site. “Barangaroo’s gesture,” says the book, “may thus be seen as a politically significant attempt to incorporate the introduced world into an Aboriginal one”. It is a lovely illustration of the mutual bewilderment of black and white, male and female, poor and privileged, and of the missed opportunities that have resulted.

`Creating A Nation’, by Grimshaw, Lake, McGrath and Quartly; McPhee Gribble, $19.95.

First published in The Age.