CHAPTER 3
James Walter
History is never far removed from the political sphere. Politicians routinely draw on historical analogies to justify a position or argument. Sometimes, they indulge in extensive, competitive debates about Australian history, as in the contentious ‘history wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s, in which Paul Keating and John Howard were principal players.1 At other times, a period or philosophy will be rewritten by the politically engaged, or iconic figures reinterpreted – the refiguring of the 1950s, the recent new biographies of Robert Menzies, or the reinterpretation of Australian liberalism (by David Kemp), for example.2
The link between mainstream politics and policy formulation depends upon policy professionals – public servants, advisers and consultants. They too, periodically refer to lessons from the past to address problems of the present. Revisiting previous depressions and recessions in formulating successful responses to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2010, for instance; experience which in turn influenced responses to the 2020 pandemic.3
Professional historians also sometimes feel compelled to enter the political fray, deploying their expertise to promote a position about which they feel strongly, embarking on projects intended to influence public consciousness and shift the political register. This chapter deals with historians who are so inclined. But when historians engage in the political sphere – moving from research and analysis to advocacy and influence – their effectiveness depends upon recognition of the distinctive differences in modes of work, institutional constraints and expectations in the political, policy and historical domains.
Political need versus historical inquiry
Harold Lasswell once defined the core question of political science as ‘who gets what, when and how?’4 For politicians, this means, how are such issues to be determined, to my government’s advantage? As a result, the question is always framed not only in relation to expressions of public demand, but also by partisan preferences, as other chapters in this collection demonstrate, and the overriding imperative: staying in power. For their policy intermediaries – bureaucrats, advisers and others – the task is to identify how to achieve those ends and implement them once decisions are made. Timelines are short; the need is immediate: to meet promises made in the last election campaign, and to contribute to a commanding position in the next.
Historians, however, ask different questions: who did what, when and why? Their perspective on time is entirely different from that of a politician: rarely contemporary, and long term rather than immediate. The historian is driven by curiosity; the work of a politician or policy adviser is driven by need. The logic of historical inquiry is at odds with the logic of politics and policy.5 Academic historical projects are often constrained by grant stipulations, and continuous publication expectations are pressing, but historians think in terms of years rather than deadlines of weeks or months. Their professional experience, then, is not well suited to devising research oriented to current policy objectives, even if asked. If invited to operate ‘inside the tent’, they would encounter alien working conditions, as some, such as James Button and Dennis Glover, testify.6
Historians working ‘inside the tent’
Despite these obstacles, some do manage to bridge that divide. Feminist historians, such as Kay Daniels, Miriam Dixson, Beverley Kingston and Anne Summers, posed the penetrating questions that some of their peers, such as Elizabeth Reid and Sarah Dowse, simultaneously took forward into governmental roles in the 1970s and 1980s.7 In the reform period that followed, they learned to adapt the language of feminist reform to the managerial, neoliberal expectations of the time.8
Flowing from her pioneering contribution as a feminist historian, Daniels was appointed by Susan Ryan (then Minister for Education) in 1984 as full-time chair of the Committee to Review Australian Studies in Higher Education, which reported in 1987.9 Her fellow commissioners were an historian, Humphrey McQueen, and a literary scholar with Australian Studies interests, Bruce Bennett. The committee recommended the incorporation of Australian content across the curriculum, not just the development of a specialist field. Australian Studies flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. In that period it influenced curriculum developments, and effected some institutional change, with the establishment of centres at some universities (including a government-funded National Centre at Monash University) and a few, with government support, abroad (at Harvard, the University of London and Georgetown). By the early 2000s the momentum had flagged.
The careers of professional historians who went on to influential roles in government should be acknowledged. Daniels herself, ‘a natural networker’, was appointed in 1989 to a senior position in the Department of Communications and the Arts, where she provided intellectual leadership in cultural policy, intellectual property and moral rights, and Indigenous rights.10 Peter Shergold, an economic historian whose academic career was interrupted by an invitation to serve in government, eventually rose to the top of the Australian Public Service (APS), as Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C). His talent for bureaucracy was complemented by an historian’s insistence on evidence-based argument, enabling him to persuade a reluctant John Howard and his cabinet to support climate emission measures.11 After leaving the APS, arguably Shergold’s work as Coordinator General for Refugee Resettlement in NSW was informed by his earlier experience as an economic historian who had explored settlement patterns.12 Don Watson, in his remarkable account of working as a speechwriter in Paul Keating’s prime ministerial office, has provided perhaps the most extensive testimony of a historian working ‘inside the tent’.13 Inevitably, it provoked an extensive reply from Keating, who objected to Watson’s revelations, and disputed his contribution to some of Keating’s most influential statements.14 Yet, despite the subsequent debate over authorship, Watson’s research into the tragedy of settler history for Indigenous nations was undoubtedly the fount on which Keating’s famous Redfern speech drew.15
While these instances provide examples which readers find illuminating, most historians will never be so closely engaged. For to step inside the tent is a significant diversion from historical research, at which career-oriented professionals may baulk (though, as Watson has demonstrated, it is possible to return).16 The question for historians, then, is one of how to establish, for political practitioners, the relevance of history as a substantial contribution to contemporary policy and political debate.
Achieving influence from outside the tent
At one level, the work can be educative, and directed to relationship building – such as the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ periodic organisation of meetings between politicians and academics, or the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia’s ‘The Social Sciences Shape the Nation’ project, identifying the contributions of social scientists (including historians) to key social policy initiatives over decades, or the engagement of historians in parliamentary inquiries, such as a recent Senate Committee Inquiry into ‘Nationhood, national identity and democracy’.17 It remains difficult to ascertain how much influence such exercises have on what is subsequently done, but all research on public policy efficacy maintains that relationship building is a core objective.18
Investing in relationships
Relationships were integral to a further educational initiative in which, like the earlier Australian Studies exercise, much hope was invested in the 1990s: the Civics Expert Group, and its successor, the Civics Education Group, each led by an historian, Stuart Macintyre and John Hirst respectively. Neither of these worked ‘inside the tent’. Instead, Macintyre and Hirst served to link political concern and historical inquiry. Nonetheless, the initial civics group had a secretariat within PM&C, and strong support from then prime minister Paul Keating, with whom Macintyre had established a connection. Concern about a perceived diminution in social cohesion and deficiencies in civic knowledge had been flagged by the Senate Standing Committee for Employment, Education and Training in 1989 and 1992.19 At the same time Macintyre, who was friendly with a number of Labor politicians, presented an Academy Lecture, ‘Rethinking Australian Citizenship’.20
In early 1994, Macintyre submitted a short paper to then prime minister Keating arguing that our schools were neglecting civics education. Two months later he was appointed by Keating to chair the Civics Expert Group, with educationists Ken Boston and Susan Pascoe. Macintyre discussed the work of the Civics Expert Group and its report, delivered in December 1994, in a later essay, ‘An Expert’s Confession’.21 Before much was achieved in implementing its recommendations, a change to Coalition government in 1996 entailed a new direction, with the group retitled the Civics Education Group, charged with developing curriculum materials, now chaired by John Hirst, and reporting to the Liberal Minister for Education, David Kemp – himself a former academic and, following his political career, a prolific contributor to the history of Australian liberalism.22 Whereas the earlier report identified means to promote civic awareness, recognition of rights and responsibilities, and institutional knowledge as a foundation for active citizenship, the Civics Education Group presented models of education in Australian democracy, with an emphasis on what were presented as core values – later used by Coalition governments to devise citizenship tests.23 The outcome was a series of citizenship and civics curriculum materials, and texts of lasting interest, such as Hirst’s Australia’s Democracy and The Sentimental Nation.24 Simultaneously, including citizenship research as a research objective for Australian Research Council grants engendered a brief flourishing of citizenship histories.25 However, the civics push, as with earlier Australian Studies innovations, proved to be of limited duration – although the question of how citizenship articulates with social cohesion has remained a recurrent concern for governments.26
Historians have made a more lasting contribution as expert witnesses in significant political deliberations, such as their participation (along with anthropologists and archaeologists) in the resolution of Indigenous claims to Country. Here, particular outcomes are possible to identify in the success or failure of specific land claims. Further, it is in the field of settler–Indigenous relationships that historians may well have had the most decisive influence on public consciousness, and hence on policy development, as we shall see.
Seizing the moment
Political systems – not only parliaments, parties and civil service agencies, but also the institutionalised ideas generated in a particular historical moment, with lasting effects – are slow to change. The political scientist Alan Davies once talked of the characteristic torpor in Australia’s political culture occasionally being disrupted by periods of frenzied reform.27 Political scientists argue that system equilibrium is the norm, but that this is periodically ‘punctuated’ by unexpected events or unforeseen consequences of past actions, demanding significant rethinking.28 Such moments create a ‘window’ in which new ideas are needed, and reform movements can gain purchase – the conditions for the ‘frenzied reform’ to which Davies pointed.29
We are living in just such an historical moment. For some time, the government-driven neoliberal market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, in which government is said to have opted for ‘steering rather than rowing’, have been celebrated as having created the prosperity Australia has enjoyed for decades. Frank Bongiorno explores the fallacies of this heroic narrative in Chapter 2. Yet there has been a growing chorus of dissent, as levels of inequality have increased and casual employment and wage stagnation have undermined faith in the labour market. Further, provision for the welfare of the most disadvantaged has deteriorated; and the promise of privatised monopolies being more agile, cost efficient and responsive to our demands than government bodies, while kept in check by competition and light-touch regulation, has been unrealised.
A decade ago, the GFC was thought by some to augur necessary reform, but neoliberalism appeared so entrenched that politics soon reverted to business as usual – though its critics, including some economists, kept chipping away.30 Now, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has impelled government action, and economic intervention on such a substantial scale that the relative equilibrium of past decades has been disrupted, opening a window for change if proponents of reform can seize the moment. Larry Elliott, a prominent economic columnist in the United Kingdom, argues that the pandemic has made a 20-year-long structural and social crisis so starkly apparent that it may finally put paid to entrenched assumptions, making change imperative: ‘if not now, when?’31 Historians have been quick to respond.
To take one example, Emma Dawson, director of a progressive think tank, and the historian Janet McCalman, commissioned a wide range of contributors from a variety of disciplines (including some politicians) to contribute to What Happens Next? Reconstructing Australia after COVID-19, written during the early months of the pandemic.32 Graeme Davison refers to McCalman’s own chapter about the post– Second World War reconstruction project in Chapter 1. The pandemic demanded such a decisive suspension of established conventions that many who had been frustrated when earlier efforts to address the shortcomings of contemporary politics failed to gain purchase, recognised that the moment of disequilibrium presented their opportunity. Though future oriented, their historical impress was strong, with numerous contributors writing from different expert vantages but referring back to, and elaborating upon, the lessons that might be drawn from the transformation of the economy and society achieved in the period of postwar reconstruction. The point was not to suggest that such initiatives could be replicated, but to sketch the varieties of transformative thinking the crises of depression and war had engendered, and to establish that in the face of society-wide catastrophes that threaten us all, such thinking, based on collective action, consensus building and institutional reform, must be revived. Written in a crisp, accessible style, the objective was to reach a wide audience, informing public debate by presenting a positive agenda responsive to public disquiet and uncertainty, that may shift political opinion. We shall see.
Another more immediate-term instance of historians seizing the moment successfully to influence a policy decision was the 2021 campaign, led by journalist Gideon Haigh and Graeme Davison, to secure crucial funding for the National Archives of Australia (NAA). The NAA had, over many years, been struggling to achieve its mandated objectives as its funding had been incrementally depleted. That it had reached a crisis point was manifest in a review led by former Finance Department secretary, David Tune. Commissioned in 2019, the Tune Review reported in January 2021, and indicated that unless additional funding, estimated at $167.4 million, was provided for digitisation, crucial records would be lost.33 On releasing the report in March 2021, the government stated that it accepted all of the Tune Review recommendations, but in the ensuing federal budget, no additional funds were provided. One hundred and fifty dismayed researchers, preponderantly historians, immediately rallied to the call from Haigh and Davison to sign an open letter to the government, published in the Australian, deploring this failure to deliver. To utilise Haigh’s connections to the Australian, a broadsheet not favoured by progressives, but widely read by the political class, was strategically canny. Following the letter, a series of articles and presentations by high-profile historians not only in the Australian, but also via a range of press, online and radio channels, provided impassioned but accessible, persuasive case studies of what was about to be lost. Meanwhile, less publicly, petitions from genealogical and community history societies, and briefing notes for the prime minister, were initiated. An advocacy coalition was created.34 Then the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, phoned Haigh, met with the director of the NAA, and went on to strongly advocate for additional emergency funding. As a result, the government backflipped, awarding $67.7 million for at risk preservation and digitisation programs, thus averting immediate disaster.35
Playing a long game
Most historians hope that their work will reach readers beyond their professional circles. We can learn from instances that have succeeded and have arguably shaped public consciousness and political awareness. These are produced by historians who, rather than entering the policy domain directly, building relationships with contacts in political or policy circles, or ‘seizing the moment’, instead effect change from below by stimulating public awareness and achieving the crossover into public engagement and debate. They may do so by being so confronting as to deny being ignored, or so innovative and persuasive as to gain a public following, but they typically rely on a cumulative build-up of research in the field in which they appear.
Research into settler–Indigenous relations, by both settler and Indigenous historians, has burgeoned since the ‘new history’ innovations of the 1970s. Among settler historians, speaking to a non-Indigenous audience, there have been successive waves of publications that have persuaded many Australians to recognise the tragedy of what was experienced by Aboriginal people resisting European incursions on ‘the other side of the frontier’, and to recognise their resilience.36 Legal authorities and governments have sometimes responded (as, for instance, in the Mabo decision and legislation that followed), and at other times (as at present) have lagged behind public opinion.37 One instance of groundbreaking research that confronts us in ways that cannot be denied is Lyndall Ryan’s early work on Aboriginal Tasmanians, and recent (continuing) work, with colleagues, mapping the many sites, Australia-wide, where Aboriginal people were massacred. Ryan’s first book, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981), documenting the history of Tasmanian Aboriginal people from European colonisation to the present, caused immediate controversy. It not only described the decimation inherent in colonial Aboriginal ‘protection’, but also challenged the myth that they had not survived, supporting the claims of those who maintained their Indigenous heritage.38 It was inevitably one of the texts persistently denounced in ‘the history wars’.39 It was sorely misrepresented. Research by others, on massacres in other colonies, had preceded Ryan, and would later substantially amplify her discoveries.40 Still, Ryan, an exemplar of the long game, persisted. Now, based at the University of Newcastle, she is internationally acclaimed as one of the lead researchers of Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia 1788–1930, an influential project that has decisively repudiated earlier critics and achieved crossover into the public realm with extensive coverage in the Guardian (as the core element in its ‘The Killing Times’ series), and attention in opinion-leading international media such as The New Yorker.41
In parallel, we have been encouraged to attend better to how the narratives of settlement, settlers and Indigenous nations are so interwoven that they must jointly be understood. It is limiting to see the settler–colonial state as a unified, oppressive entity without exploring the varied nuances, experiences, and intentions of those comprising the settler population. Historians such as Peter Read and Tim Rowse have been significant contributors to such work over the long term.42 A standout current instance is the research of Grace Karskens, whose books, The Colony (2009) and People of the River (2020), drawing extensively on archaeology and history, have been so marvellously evocative and readable that they have garnered literary awards, gaining an audience beyond the academy. In recovering ‘the lost worlds of early Australia’, Karskens helps us to see how settlers and Indigenous peoples, shaped by different histories and webs of meaning as alien to us now as they were to each other then, became interlinked by circumstance, irrevocably enmeshed in a community of fate.43
Another project, led by Mark Finnane at Griffith University, of remarkable innovation that will have enduring influence is The Prosecution Project, which began in 2013.44 A collaborative enterprise focused on the history of the criminal trial in Australia, it employs, on the one hand, historians in multiple locations familiar with big data collection and, on the other, utilisation of crowd-sourced ‘citizen science’: volunteers recruited through contacting family and community history societies and state archival volunteer groups. By exploring the conditions under which crime is defined, perpetrated, discovered, investigated, prosecuted, punished or ignored, over time and across space, it will promote understanding of the multiple factors involved in criminal behaviour.
The Prosecution Project aims to digitise and make accessible for future researchers and the wider community the records of criminal proceedings brought against individuals for serious crimes committed in all the Australian jurisdictions from the beginning of European settlement until at least the 1960s.45 In both its publications addressed to the research community and others directed to general readers, it has already been remarkably productive.46 It will endure because it not only advances knowledge of precedents, and of the evolution of Australian dimensions of how criminal behaviour is understood and dealt with, but also because of its purposeful resort to continuing citizen engagement and its relevance to family, community and social history. In so doing, it has enhanced general knowledge of the importance of archives and ‘become one of those undertakings that draws from as well as contributes to a general community and public understanding of the value of Australia’s historical heritage’.47 Finnane was one of the contributors to the NAA campaign discussed earlier: it is the outreach into community and influence on public awareness of projects such as his that engenders the networks through which such advocacy coalitions can be mobilised.
Lessons from history:
The importance of history in creating constituencies for change
Clearly, we can learn from the way in which social and political challenges of the past have been addressed or mishandled. Periodically, crises arise which disturb social equilibrium. Then politicians and their policy advisers may grasp for historical precedents in helping to understand complex problems, or to justify their actions. In such circumstances, community activists too may draw from history in their efforts to articulate a message that will sway decision-makers. Published books and articles may be a ready resource. But there are also opportunities for historians to exercise their expertise in influencing the policy domain, or in mobilising community opinion.
Historians concerned to bridge the divide between their domain and the policy world can find helpful frameworks for doing so, drawn from political and policy studies.48 These disciplines have developed useful core concepts from which we can learn – network relationships, webs of meaning, punctuated equilibrium, policy windows and advocacy coalitions, for example.
These can, however, be translated into propositions more amenable to historians – the logic to be recognised ‘inside the tent’, the potential of ‘investing in relationships’, campaigns to ‘seize the moment’, and ‘playing a long game’ to confront and stimulate political awareness and create constituencies for change. The advantage of case studies such as those discussed earlier – indeed, the advantage of the historical approach as a whole – is the demonstration of our capacity to achieve the crossover from expert interchange to community engagement, from disciplinary debate to public mobilisation. On this, political progress depends.