Australian Prime Minister Research Articles

From Burma Battles to “the Bright Lights of Brisbane”

At the height of the Pacific war, Australian Prime Minister John Curtin elevated American journalists' roles in his governance to elicit U.S. enthusiasm for his country's defense. This study reveals new insights into how another Allied nation's leader expanded American press interactions to influence the White House during World War II. As a former journalist, Curtin extended his candid press talks and the fledgling Australian radio and newsreel media to involve U.S. reporters in his campaign for an escalated offensive from America's Southwest Pacific headquarters in Brisbane, Australia. Yet he lost key American press support for preventing some of his country's troops from fighting in the Allies' battles in Burma. Through a rare analysis of secret diaries, confidential briefings, and unscreened newsreels, this article shows how Curtin developed remarkably uncensored American journalistic reports to reclaim positive news coverage of the U.S.-led advance from Australia to help win the war.

‘Legitimating Fictions’: The Rule of Law, the Northern Territory Intervention and the War on Terror

On 21 June 2007, the Australian Prime Minister John Howard declared war. In response to the latest in a line of reports about child sexual abuse, he declared a ‘national emergency’ and swiftly suspended the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (RDA).1 He deployed over 600 military personnel, Federal Australian Police and the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) Investigators into 73 targeted Aboriginal communities across Northern and Central Australia. As a result, these communities saw alcohol and pornography banned, mandatory income quarantining regimes introduced, community assets seized and the Government compulsorily reacquiring Aboriginal land on five-year leases.

Framing and blaming in times of economic crisis

This article takes a critical approach to the language used by Australian politicians during the global financial crisis of 2007–8. Critical periods in history provide a rich substrate for the appearance of new expressions with the potential to frame the debate, influencing the ways events are interpreted and blame attributed. Passing unnoticed into usage, such memes have the potential to become part of unexamined background knowledge and covertly co-opt hearers and users into shared systems of value and belief. The study focusses on one specific neologism deployed by opposition politicians, firstly in an attempt to create the erroneous impression that a recession was occurring and secondly that it was the fault of the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Patterns of occurrence were tracked against local and international events, indicating a life cycle with several distinct phases: chance emergence, a strategic deployment, cross-genre diffusion, resistance and eventual rejection.

The Ambiguous Migrant. A Profile of African Refugee Resettlement and Personal Experiences in Southeast Queensland, Australia

Australian history is marked by immigration control and attempts to exclude foreigners. Exclusionary strategies toward foreigners are expressed in policies that limit numbers and types of migrants and foster exclusionist attitudes amongst the population. Successive Australian prime ministers have won elections based on policies of immigration and border control. Fear and rejection of foreigners characterize current policies toward asylum seekers and refugees; importantly, this stance also affects the allocation of resources to support refugee resettlement. I examine the implications of underfunding health and social support services for African refugees in Brisbane. A profile of this population is provided along with a discussion of resettlement services. Abdominal pain and inadequate responses by the health system serve to exemplify the complex experiences of newcomers who have not yet found their place in Australia.

George Dionisios Dracoulis

Nuclear physicist George Dionisios Dracoulis had a vibrant and charismatic personality. As a meticulous researcher, he was known for the reliability of his results—if George had measured it, then you knew it was right. And he took his wit and wisdom outside the laboratory when he served as a respected science adviser to the Australian government. He passed away at home in Canberra, Australia, on 19 June 2014 after a short battle with cancer.George Dionisios DracoulisPPT|High resolutionBorn in Melbourne, Australia, on 19 December 1944, George pursued his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Melbourne, from which he received a PhD in nuclear physics in 1970. After a three-year postdoctoral research position at the University of Manchester in the UK, he returned to Australia to take a research position at the Australian National University in Canberra, where the world’s largest tandem Van de Graaff heavy-ion accelerator was under construction. George played an integral, and soon leading, role in the accelerator’s development and exploitation as a research facility. As head of the university’s department of nuclear physics from 1992 until his retirement in 2009, he established it as one of the most respected nuclear-physics laboratories in the world.In retirement, George continued as an indefatigable researcher. He traveled the world to perform experiments and speak at conferences until diagnosed with kidney cancer in March of this year. In addition to having a network of friends and colleagues around the globe, George enjoyed extended visits to Stony Brook University in New York, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and the University of Surrey in the UK.George made seminal contributions to the understanding of nuclear structure: the way different nuclear shapes can coexist; the way nuclear vibrations, especially octupole vibrations, can couple to neutron and proton excitations; and the way metastable excited states, or isomers, can be used to probe nuclear spin and shape properties. He was renowned for the thoroughness of his experimental approach, which he combined with a deep physical understanding of nuclear phenomena.Among the numerous awards George received were the Australian Academy of Science’s 2003 Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal for outstanding contributions to our understanding of the structure of atomic nuclei and the Australian Institute of Physics’ 2004 Walter Boas Medal for excellence in physics research.George served as a member of the Australian Prime Minister’s Select Task Force on Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy in 2006. As professor emeritus, he remained active in public education and continued to engage with the media and in the public discussion of nuclear energy and nuclear technology. George also continued his nuclear-physics research work until only a few weeks before he died.George will be greatly missed by his family, friends, and colleagues around the world.© 2014 American Institute of Physics.

A functional analysis of the 2010 Australian Prime Minister debate

This study applied the Functional Theory of Political Campaign Discourse to the July 25, 2010 Australian Prime Minister debate. Attacks were more common than acclaims, both of which occurred more frequently than defenses. Incumbent Prime Minister Gillard acclaimed more, and attacked less, than challenger Abbott. This contrast was particularly acute when the candidates discussed past deeds (record in office). The two candidates discussed policy more than character. When discussing general goals and ideals, they acclaimed more than they attacked. These results are compared with studies of political leaders debates in other countries and elections.

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Dreaming of Child Safe Organisations?

On 12 November 2012 the then Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced she was recommending to the Governor General the establishment of a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Following inquiries in Australia and elsewhere much is already known about institutional and inter-institutional child protection failures and what is required to address them. That Australia’s national government has pursued another abuse inquiry with terms of reference limited to institution-based (excluding the family) sexual abuse is of interest given the lack of political will to enact previous findings and recommendations. This article examines the background to the Government’s announcement, the Commission’s terms of reference and some of its settings, and literature on the nature of royal commissions across time and place. After the lack of success in implementing the recommendations of previous inquiries into how to better protect Australia’s children, the question is: how will this Royal Commission contribute to Australian child protection and safety? Will the overwhelming public support generated by “truth speaking to power” in calling for this inquiry translate into action?

Dispatches

Dispatches

Leadership and the media: Gendered framings of Julia Gillard's ‘sexism and misogyny’ speech

This article analyses Australian media portrayals of former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's ‘sexism and misogyny’ speech to parliament in October 2012. Our analysis reveals that coverage of the speech comprised three principal gendered framings: strategic attack, uncontrolled emotional outpouring and hypocrisy. We argue that these framings demonstrate the role the media plays as a gendered mediator, perpetuating the gender double bind that constrains female political leaders, as they negotiate the demand to demonstrate masculine leadership attributes without tarnishing the feminine qualities expected of them. In this instance, gendered media framings limited the saliency of Gillard's speech, curtailed calls for wider introspection on Australian political culture and further disassociated women from political leadership.本文分析了澳大利亚媒体围绕前总理朱丽娅吉拉德2012年在国会的所做“歧视、憎恶女性”的发言对她所做的描画。对那次讲话的报道主要由三个性别镜框构成。一是战略进攻，二是情绪宣泄，三是伪善。我们认为，这些镜框显示了媒体作为性别化的中介，加固了对女性政治领袖性别上的双重束缚：这些领袖既要展示阳刚的领导作风又要不失社会所期待的一些女性气质。在这个案例中，性别化的媒体报道，将吉拉德讲话狭隘化，妨碍了对澳大利亚政治文化的反思，割裂了女性与政治领导的关系。

“Characteristically Generous”? Australian Responses to Refugees Prior to 1951

When Australia pledged to accept 15,000 Jewish refugees from Europe in 1938, it was applauded by the London Times as “a characteristically generous contribution” and an example for others. Australia's reputation for generous humanitarianism was solidified after the war when it absorbed more than 180,000 of Europe's Displaced Persons and committed to international human rights instruments designed to protect refugees and asylum seekers. This reputation has been used to both defend and critique the nation's contemporary responses to asylum seekers. Recent Australian Prime Ministers have invoked Australia's proud record of refugee resettlement to deflect criticism of their tough border control policies, policies which critics charge repudiate the nation's humanitarian traditions. This article critically reviews the history of Australia's responses to refugees and asylum seekers prior to 1951 and demonstrates that contemporary border control policies are neither a deviation from, nor defence of, a proud humanitarian record. Rather, they embody the migration management approach to refugees that provided impetus for Federation in 1901, governed Australia's response to the Jewish refugee crisis in the 1930s, and shaped its conditional acceptance of the Displaced Persons and the position it adopted in the drafting of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951.

Practical vs. identity regionalism: Australia's APC initiative, a case study

On 4 June 2008 Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced his ‘vision for an Asia Pacific community’ (APC). Though failing to win support among Asian countries, the initiative offers a useful case study. This article does not focus on the motives and interests of the various governments responding to the proposal but rather on the different (and sometimes conflicting) understandings of regionalism that underpinned those responses. In its diplomatic advocacy of the APC, the Australian government stressed ‘practical regionalism’ – emphasizing the capacity of such a new ‘community’ to deal with security, economic, environmental and other challenges faced in recent times in the Asia-Pacific region. The Australian campaign gave little attention, however, to the influence of cognitive and emotive factors in community planning: it neglected ‘identity’ regionalism. In particular, it did not seem to take seriously the possible role of non-Western perspectives in shaping the development of post-colonial inter-state relations. Through the investigation of key Asian-language terms – relating to the English terms for ‘region’ and ‘community’ – this article seeks to demonstrate the importance of the identity dimension in both policy development and academic analysis. It argues for an analytic and diplomatic skillset that goes beyond the disciplines of international relations and economics and draws upon expertise in linguistics and regional political cultures.

National Interests and Global Norms in Australia’s Policies towards the Asia-Pacific

Australia’s foreign policy towards the Asia-Pacific region is primarily driven by self-interest. Australian prime ministers, foreign ministers, diplomats and other political leaders have asserted on various occasions that their goal in the region has always been to promote Australia’s national interests while at the same time helping some of the states in the region meet some of their needs. However, Australia has not pursued self-interests to the exclusion of global values and norms. This article examines Australia’s policy towards the Asia-Pacific region and explains how governments have tried to align national interests with global values in the region since the Cold War ended.

Presidents, Prime Ministers and Policy Rhetoric: The ‘Credibility Gaps’ of Woodrow Wilson and Kevin Rudd in the League of Nations and Climate Change Debates

US President Woodrow Wilson and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd were separated by institutional contexts, relative power positions and decades in time. However, each confronted a similar dilemma — of reconciling rhetorical idealism with policy practicalities. Building on insights from studies of the US rhetorical presidency, we offer a framework highlighting the tensions between ‘outside’ moral appeals which raise expectations and the ‘inside’ technocratic rhetoric of policy administration. We argue that norms encouraging moral appeals have come to transcend institutional differences between ‘presidential’ and ‘prime ministerial’ systems. Despite the different contexts of the Wilson-era League of Nations debate and the Rudd-era carbon tax-Kyoto controversies, we argue that pressures to ‘speak in two voices’ engendered credibility gaps that undermined each leader's congressional and parliamentary support. In concluding, we suggest that this analysis supports a more nuanced appreciation of the rhetorical imperatives that can impede policy efficiency — and the need to limit tendencies to either populist or intellectual partisanship.

How Does A Prime Minister Speak?

This paper investigates how political subjectivity is framed and expressed through language use in television political interviews. The paper argues that Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field provide a useful framework for analyses of political subjectivity in news media interviews, but it also argues that the more sociological emphasis of Bourdieu’s theory cannot sufficiently account for the constitutive importance of discourse in the agency of the habitus and the boundaries and authority of different fields. As such, the analysis also draws on critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how Prime Ministerial discourse involves negotiations of different constitutive features of an individual subjectivity, and also negotiations between a particular habitus and the exigencies of the journalistic and political fields. Through an analysis of interviews of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on influential Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) programmes,Insidersand the7.30 Report, it is argued that the Prime Minister attempts to exercise political authority through an ensemble of discourses, initiating different relations with the interviewers, political colleagues and opponents, leading public figures in other fields, and the Australian public.

Kevin’s Predicaments

This article grounds the concept of political celebrity in the contexts of the differentiated media or journalistic field, and it also investigates the functions of political celebrity in the exercise of political leadership where individuals must negotiate the relationship between the political and media fields. Through a discussion of the changing political fortunes of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, the power of political celebrity is attributed to particular structural negotiations between the political and media fields, and also to exploitations of the temporality of political cycles, and the ephemerality of the currency of political celebrity. It is also argued that political celebrity is an unstable phenomenon, partly because it encapsulates a tension between different conceptualizations of subjectivity, where the positing of an autonomous, authentic self competes with a more situational and performative understanding of the self and that this latter understanding of political celebrity is exacerbated in the contexts of post-broadcast democracy.

A contextual framework for assessing reconstructive prime ministerial success

This article develops a framework for assessing political leadership success by comparing leaders in similar historical contexts. It finds that Nichols and Myers's three tasks of reconstruction can be used to assess the relative success of reconstructive prime ministers, but that the tasks are more complex than their original conception acknowledges. Examination of three reconstructive Australian prime ministers shows that the relationship between skill and context is intricate. Different skills and leadership styles are suited to different contexts but are also suited to different aspects of the shared context. Reconstructive leaders must also pay sufficient attention to tasks that are beyond their natural strengths.

Chinese Perspectives on the Feasibility of an Asia Pacific Community

The ongoing worries complicating China’s rise are exacerbated by China’s perceived double-bind dilemma: China is attacked as a threat to regional stability when it is active in the regional arena and damned as an irresponsible stakeholder when it is not. As an emerging global power China is naturally seeking to secure its ever-increasing interests abroad. Therefore, China’s double-bind will intensify as China’s foreign policy evolves from ‘biding its time and hiding its capacities’ to that of an increasingly proactive regional actor. The author argues that, in light of this likely transition in Chinese foreign policy conduct, the time is more pressing than ever before to mitigate anxieties and maximise the chances of China’s positive-sum integration within the region. The argument correlates with the proposal by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008 that the region begin contemplating the realisation of an Asia Pacific community (APc) concept, as a framework to rehabilitate the region’s multilateral architectural mélange and implicitly reform the ASEAN Way-driven modus operandi with a more muscular APc Way. Such an outcome may be realised through streamlining the region’s institutional alphabet soup and reforming the lacklustre ASEAN Way.

Playing second fiddle in a dysfunctional orchestra: Australia, Britain and the Suez Canal 1950–56

The failure of Australian Prime Minister Menzies' mission to Egypt in 1956 and the expulsion of the Australian diplomatic mission from Cairo dominate thinking about Australian Middle East diplomacy during the 1950s. Archival records, particularly in regard to the issue of the Suez Canal base negotiations concluding in 1954 show a predisposition, with occasional racist undertones, on the part of the Menzies government to line up with its British counterpart. Despite changing regional realities, and notwithstanding efforts by Australian officials in Cairo and Canberra to inject greater realism and caution into Australia's stance, Casey gave departmental officials little support. The article underlines the importance in Australian foreign policy of according appropriate weighting to fraternal and alliance-focussed concerns, but also to having the skills and experience required to evaluate the degree to which Australian interests may be affected by events on the ground and the policy choices of our partners.

Destroying the Joint and Dying of Shame? A Geography of Revitalised Feminism in Social Media and Beyond

AbstractHas feminist geography really lost all relevance? This paper examines what the revitalisation of interest in feminist thought and practice, especially in Australia, means for geography. We illuminate the trajectory of the feminist revitalisation in new media and beyond through developing a spatial analysis influenced by Rose and Fincher. Notions of paradoxical space and issue publics inform this reading of two pivotal moments in the feminist revitalisation: first, the creation of Destroy the Joint, a campaign launched and maintained in Facebook and Twitter spaces; and second, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's speech against sexism and misogyny in Parliament in October 2012. Both these moments, coming from political and public spaces, received worldwide interest, and we critically examine the context and ramifications of these instances while situating the institutional processes surrounding them within the growing feminist revitalisation. In so doing, we argue that these Australian‐based cases indicate a growing feminist movement that is open and multiply focused, connecting personal politics to public campaigning, and achieving material impacts. We conclude that developing a feminist geography of new media is a challenging task, as these spaces circumvent and renegotiate traditional spatial dimensions – including scale and place – through their dynamic networks. It is, nevertheless, a task worth doing.

Water Information Services for Australians

On 26 January 2007, following a prolonged period of severe drought and rapidly diminishing water supplies, the Australian Prime Minister announced the National Plan for Water Security, a 10-point plan signif cantly enhancing Commonwealth involvement in the nation’s water affairs. One of the pillars of the reforms was a signif cant commitment to improve the quality and coverage of Australia’s water information. The Bureau of Meteorology was directed to implement the Improving Water Information Program, supported by signif cant funding and a legislative mandate under the Water Act 2007. This paper traces the evolution of these new water information arrangements and highlights some of the new water information services that have emerged under the program. They include periodic water resource assessments, an annual national water account, various web products summarising the state of our water resources, and a seasonal streamflow forecasting service. Like their weather and climate service counterparts issued by the Bureau of Meteorology, these services have some important characteristics, namely that they are enduring, repeatable, robust, trusted and tailored to end user needs. The success of the program to date has been facilitated by appropriate resourcing levels, a clear legislative mandate, high levels of cooperation across the water sector and strong support from the water research and development community.