Descripción, interpretación y valoración.

Howard’s defeat in 2007 should not detract from his considerable political achievements in bending the Australian state to suit his own political agenda. One of the key purposes of any state is, naturally enough, the building of institutional structures designed to understand, interpret, and respond to foreign threats to its sovereignty. What becomes clear is that the Howard model of government worked with the Parliament in particular ways and borrowed from other governments specific organisational strategies to deal with what it saw as the principal antagonists threatening national security. The United States was not only a key ally after September 11; it provided elements of state apparatus that could be copied and grafted on to the existing structure. The Howard Government’s machinery of government moved closer to a Washington model, although the American concept of a separate Homeland Security Department was not taken up, and Howard’s state retained certain key Australian characteristics.

In analysing the Australian state, the fact that an external event such as September 11 could so profoundly alter the balance, structure and operations of government is in itself an important clue to the nature of that state. Just as the fall of Singapore in the Pacific War set in train fundamental alterations to the Australian state under John Curtin and Ben Chifley, September 11 was a powerful trigger for change in the political

circumstances of a Conservative government in the middle years of its life. Singapore was a British naval bastion, so its fall in February 1942 led the Australian Prime Minister Chifley to look ‘without pangs’ to America for an alliance in the war against Japan. September 11 seized the imagination of the Australian public to the same degree. All normal television transmissions on all stations gave way to 24 hours of continuous broadcasts from New York and Washington. No other event in Australian history has occasioned this response. Howard called the election on 5 October, just weeks after the terrorist attacks (in Australia, as in Britain, the incumbent government can decide the date of an election), and set Saturday 10 November 2001 as the polling date. Labor suffered its worst result since 1934 and Beazley resigned as leader of the opposition (he was later recalled to the post).

Australia is a federation of the six self-governing colonies of British settlers established in different parts of the continent between 1788 and 1890. Although the Commonwealth of Australia was formed only in 1901 it is guided by political processes that are deeply-rooted in the progressive English traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These democratic political aspirations found their earliest expression not within the imperial metropolis, but on the boundaries of empire (Markoff 1999, pp. 660-90). The Australian state was thus formed within a vigorously democratic polity. September 11 offered a rare opportunity to reshape this state within a particular party-political context. In a political system where party positions are finely tuned and one carefully calibrated issue can swing an election result, the fear of foreign Islamic terrorists could be used to great effect and the resources of the state mobilised in support of this political agenda.

The ideological position of political parties in a democratic system like Australia’s become modified when a party wins government. This is partly due to the challenges of guiding a state, with its own particular logic and momentum, and partly due to the knock of external events, of which September 11 is an extreme example. In Government the work of the political party is carried out by the Cabinet, and it is in the directing of Cabinet that a Prime Minister like Howard seeks to put in place what he or

she sees as the appropriate policy direction of their Government. But Howard, as we shall see, used September 11 as a device for engineering a raft of changes to the operations of the Australian state. Some of this reshaping will no doubt remain long after the supposed threat of September 11 has come and gone, much as the fundamental changes brought about by the Fall of Singapore were left in place by Menzies when he succeeded Chifley as Prime Minister in 1949.

The Australian Constitution was written toward the end of the nineteenth century by founding fathers typified by Sir Edmund Barton (1849-1920) (see Parkin & Summers 2010, pp. 51-72). Barton also went on to be Australia’s first Prime Minister (1901 to 1903). These men were well read in the classic political philosophy texts of the early modern and modern periods, and also well-versed in the development of the United States Constitution and its system of government. The United Kingdom Parliament enacted the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act of 1900. This Constitution guaranteed the old colonial (state) constitutions and legislative powers as part of the specific provisions of the Commonwealth Constitution Act. The position of Governor General, as the Queen's representative, was created to appoint ministers to form each consecutive Government. The Separation of Powers in the Constitution gave to government power divided among the executive, judicial and legislative branches. Provisions were made for a High Court of Australia and other courts that Parliament might establish to exercise judicial power within the new Commonwealth. The Commonwealth Parliament consisted of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Following the Swiss example, the Constitution could only be changed by referendum. The referendum power in the Australian Constitution reflects the Lockean view that power is derived ultimately from the sovereignty of the people.

The six colonies making up the Federation originally ceded to the new Commonwealth only those powers that were in their mutual interest to vest in a central authority. Defence was foremost among these, and the new state put the establishment of an Australian military force high on its agenda. There had been internal violence in the settling of Australia as the Aborigines resisted the British in what are now called the

‘frontier wars’, but external aggression from real or imagined enemies did not occur until the Japanese attack of 1942. After 1901 it would also be decades before this new state developed a capacity for its own national foreign diplomacy. Part of the significance of the Fall of Singapore was, indeed, the recognition that this young state could not rely for all time on the British Empire for its external protection and relationships.

The Constitution and Separation of Powers guarantees Australia’s Executive government and law-making. Cabinet politics allows foreign policy through executive leadership subtle translations of constitutional powers like those found in the US. Different size and levels of bureaucratic decision-making controls existed as Executive- Cabinets took shape or changed. The Australian Parliament also maintains individual bureaucracies. Ministers and their private staff head respective ministerial departments managing public servants who form the bureaucracy.

The ideal Cabinet and NSC routines are outlined in the Cabinet Handbook (2004) and Gyngell and Wesley (2007, pp. 93-95). PM&C’s Annual Report makes yearly records of arrangements which are tabled in Parliament. Decision-making becomes a product of the overall rules and conventions of the Cabinet system including Ministry, Cabinet and its elements, including Cabinet committees. The bureaucracy advises and acts upon Cabinet decision-making, turning policy into action.

The Parliament does little more than process the policy decisions made by Government (see Lovell 1994, pp. 120-26). In everyday practice, however, real power is focused in Cabinet. Despite the careful formulations within the Australian Constitution, state power resides with the Prime Minister and his or her Cabinet. Cabinet’s aim is to set up and monitor the broad directions of Government. No legislation controls its actions. While Hansard puts parliamentary debates on immediate public record, Cabinet minutes are kept secret for 30 years. The founding fathers implied that the Prime Minister, once elected, would appoint the Ministers and a Cabinet would be formed around him. Labor has Ministers appointed from its party Caucus, and Labor Prime Ministers then assign them their specific portfolios (for details see Commonwealth of Australia 2002, p. 1).

The Crown-in-Cabinet principle underpins the constitutional monarchy model in operation in a modern democracy like Australia. Although the power of the state is mediated through a democratic political process, the concentration of power in the Cabinet is the key driver of this system (Commonwealth of Australia, 2002, p. 1; Gyngell & Wesley 2007, pp. 93-95). Thus, how a Prime Minister elects to use their Cabinet is fundamental to how he or she drives the state (Edwards 2007, p. 22).

On a day-to-day basis the policy decisions made by Cabinet are informed by the advice it receives, particularly as filtered through the ‘central agency’ departments – the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Treasury, and the Department of Finance and Administration. Any decision supported by the three respective Ministers (and their bureaucratic heads) is almost certain to be approved in Cabinet (Edwards 2007, pp. 22-23). In the other departments, the so-called ‘line’ departments, however, resides all the policy wisdom a Government could ever need on any issue. A Howard Government observer explained it this way:

Government is enormous. A huge number of issues confront government every day. The information management task is vast. It is not possible for one person, or even a single team of hundreds of people, to be across all of the detail of all of the issues confronting a government on any one day. Government’s approach to tackling this information problem is to divide up the work between the line agencies and the central agencies. Each line agency knows a lot about a small number of issues. In line agencies each bureaucrat works on an issue or a narrow group of issues. They will know all about the legislation, the personalities, the idiosyncrasies and the history of a particular international agreement, industry start-up program or environmental disaster. (Edwards 2007, p. 23)

Governments operate through a specific way of working this state apparatus:

By contrast, central agencies have to be across everything. Each central agency bureaucrat will have a broad brushstroke understanding of dozens of issues. But it means they don’t know very much about each one. The ideal of this system is that the

agency can detail the options for a railway contract being negotiated with a state government. And the central agency will know how that contract affects other intergovernmental agreements. Or that is the theory. (Edwards 2007, p. 23)

The dominant paradigm used by these central agencies to filter and organise the work of the line agencies is ‘economic rationalism’. A broadly economic model has operated since the 1940s: that framework was initially Keynesian, before neo-classical economic theory became hegemonic in the late 1970s. (With the global financial crisis of late 2008 some commentators were predicting a return to Keynesian thinking; others foretell the development of a new ‘sociological’ model.) Before the onset of the economic model in the 1940s, a broadly ‘legal’ approach dominated the outgrowth of late-colonial ideas about government and the rule of the state. This legal approach remains in a fossilised form in certain line agencies, notably state Departments of Justice and Corrections. These agencies see the regulation of citizens as their main purpose – they pay little attention to the economic or social effects of their work. In some Australian states the economic management was at a distance from government – for example, Victoria’s transport, utilities and urban infrastructure were put in the hands of quasi-autonomous government organisations, and the Commonwealth created similar structures for big projects like the 1940s Snowy Mountains Scheme. Economic rationalism consigned these organisational forms into the dustbin of history (Alford & O’Neill 1994, pp. 150-53).