RESOLUCIÓN N.° 307/AGC/

Introduction

December 1991 saw Paul Keating defeat Bob Hawke as leader of the ALP and become Prime Minister. The country was in the midst of recession, the polling for the ALP was poor, and the Opposition was resurgent. However, over the coming months Keating managed to meet the challenge that the Coalition had posed with their Fightback! policy program and the ALP subsequently won the ‘unwinnable’ 1993 election. His political style as Prime Minister was characterised by his ‘Big Picture’ politics:

…redefining the market as friend of the battler, reforming Australia’s economic institutions to succeed in an international age, reshaping Australian identity by abandoning the Crown for a republic, reaching reconciliation with indigenous Australians, embracing engagement with Asia as a national aspiration and entrenching the concept of a multicultural yet united nation (Kelly 2009, 4-5).

Keating also continued the practice of active Prime Ministerial engagement with Anzac that had begun with Hawke a few years earlier. Keating’s vision for Anzac was centred on the Pacific and the conflicts that had occurred there during WWII, and he sought to steer the Australian public’s view i n the same direction. This nationalist vision was bound up with his ‘Big Picture’ politics of ne ol i be ral economic reform, engagement with Asia, and an Australian republic.

Keating’s embrace of Anzac, and nationalism more generally, marked Keating as another Prime Ministerial Anzac entrepreneur, enthusiastically promoting Anzac as a central component of Australian nationalism. But Keating’s engagement with Anzac also reflected the inte rnal tension that his outward looking cosmopolitanism and his aggressive and parochial nationalism posed. It wi l l be argued that Keating was mostly unsuccessful with the main aim of his Anzac entrepreneurship, wi th his bold attempt to shift Australian war remembrance from Gallipoli to the Pacific and Kokoda ultimately failing. Holbrook (2014, 228) argues that this was due partly to Keating’s confrontational and obviously partisan rhetoric and partly due to Australians’ connection with the ori gi nal story o f Anzac centred on Gallipoli and WWI. Especially important in the rejection of Keating’s reorientati on was his baldly stated attempt to weld together the shift to the Pacific, Kokoda, and WWII, with republicanism, Asian engagement, and neoliberalism. This was an agenda that stretched the boundaries of the Anzac ideograph too far. By breaking these boundaries, Keating allowed his

121 version of Anzac to become political - more concerned with contestation than an attempt to universalise, avoid conflict, and become unpolitical, as Hawke before him and Howard after him both managed with their Anzac entrepreneurship. Partisan contestation of Keating’s Anzac entrepreneurship was therefore fierce, and Keating failed to establish his version of Anzac as an unpolitical sphere of Australian nationalism and social relations. Having said that, hi s ri gorous and enthusiastic championing of the memorialisation of WWII did succeed in institutionalising the previously neglected commemoration of the War in the Pacific, and in particular, the story of Australian soldiers fighting at Kokoda, as part of the narrative of Australia’s war service.

In order to explore the success and failure of Keating’s Anzac entrepreneurship, it will be ne ce ssary to highlight Keating’s political style and the context in which Keating was operating. The chapter does this in four sections:

1. This section presents analysis of Keating’s ‘Big Picture political style’, which is crucial to understanding his Anzac entrepreneurship. Here I draw upon Johnson’s (2000, 24-25) observation that Keating attempted to integrate the economic and social into a cosmopolitan and electorally palatable discourse of government. The secti on shows how Keating’s radical nationalism sat uncomfortably with this cosmopolitanism, and created difficulties and tensions for his political style.

2. Next, I will highlight the key policy challenges that Keating faced as Prime Minister. The first challenges were economic - the process of continued domestic economic re form and unemployment, and the middle power internationalism of his multi -lateral engagement with the region. The second group of challenges were social - the push towards a republic, Mabo and indigenous land rights, and multiculturalism.

3. Following this, I will set out a brief corpus assisted discourse analysis of Keating’s Anzac Day addresses to explore the overall characteristics of Keating’s Anzac entrepreneurship. He re it will be argued that whilst Keating’s attempt to relocate Anzac was a departure from the norm, he otherwise largely kept to the parameters of the Anzac tradition like Anzac’s other Prime Ministerial entrepreneurs.

4. Finally, the chapter will textually explore Keating’s Anzac Day addresses. It will be argue d that the most prominent theme of his addresses was the way they encouraged Australi ans to look to Asia for their economic prosperity, and to think of themselves as independent of Great Britain. The cosmopolitanism and radical nationalism of this push were not e nti re ly congruent, however, and Keating’s political style posed tensions that were ne ither e asi l y reconciled nor without controversy. Keating’s radical reconceptualisation of Anzac in 1992

122 and 1993 attracted significant opposition, and in 1994 and 1995 Anzac his addresses became far less entrepreneurial and thus attracted less controversy.

As such, it will be argued that Keating’s engagement with Anzac and Australia’s war history reflected an enthusiastic entrepreneurship that had some success in aligning his policy agenda with Anzac and the furtherance of the institutionalisation of Prime Ministerial engagement with Anzac. Ulti mate ly, however, Keating failed to institutionalise his particular vision of Australia’s war service in the Pacific and its pre-eminence over the original story of the Gallipoli landings of WWI.