The premierships of Bob Hawke (1983–91), Paul Keating (1991–96), and John Howard (1996–2007)

Malcolm Fraser served as prime minister from 1975 until March 1983. Then the Labor Party returned to office, and Bob Hawke’s term lasted about as long as Fraser’s. Under pressure from colleagues, Hawke resigned in December 1991, and Paul Keating succeeded him as party leader and prime minister. The electorate switched in March 1996, and John Howard led a coalition of Liberal and National (formerly, until 1983, Country) parties that remained in power for 11 years. Every government won at least two successive elections, and most more than that, testifying to mainstream contentment. The Labor Party came to have virtually as many middle-class professionals among its leaders as did the Liberals, and—at least when in office—gave scarcely less priority to running the economy according to the dictates of economic rationalism. By those standards the economy fared well, albeit suffering occasional setbacks (notably about 1990). Manufacturing declined considerably, but that had some balance in greater diversification and efficiency. Export of basic commodities remained vital, and international price fluctuations had less immediate impact than in the past. Unemployment figures were higher than in the previous generation, but more women were in the workforce. Many Australians enjoyed comfort, even affluence. A United Nations survey in 2000 placed Australia fourth in terms of quality of life worldwide.

There always remained some poverty and desolation. While dominant discourses stressed human rights, equality, freedom, and potential, older notions of social homogeneity seemed, if anything, yet further from realization. One division to widen was that between the big cities and rural Australia. This tension helped create the most remarkable phenomenon of the 1990s, the One Nation movement. Led by Pauline Hanson, One Nation invoked an older and not altogether mythical Australia of Anglo-Celtic ethnicity and sturdy independence. Hanson herself won election to the federal Parliament in 1996, and in the Queensland state election of mid-1998 several of her followers also succeeded. Hanson lost her seat in 1998, and her movement subsequently fell apart, but its very existence told something of the national mood.

A much-publicized decision in 1992 (filed by activist Eddie Koiki Mabo and known as the Mabo case) seemed to promise a radical legitimation of Indigenous land-rights claims. It confirmed that Australia was already occupied in a manner recognizable under British law when the first white settlers arrived. The court also ruled that, while Indigenous title had been exterminated over vast areas, it might still exist over leaseholds and unoccupied crown land. The resulting Native Title Act (1993) was unsuccessfully challenged, and subsequently, under its judgment in 1996 (the Wik case), the High Court decided that Indigenous title and pastoral leasehold could coexist. Aboriginal descent became a matter of pride, and by the early 21st century the number affirming themselves to be Aboriginal was some half million.

Meanwhile, despite such advances, the bleakness of much Aboriginal experience remained stark and disturbing—illness, alcoholism, and violence all having their part. The many deaths of Aboriginal men while in official custody added to such feeling, and still more so invocation of the long history of Aboriginal families being forcibly separated. While all governments upheld the desirability of racial reconciliation, they remained reluctant to make a formal apology for past wrongs.

Debate as to constitutional change quickened in the late 1990s, many seeing the time as opportune for a shift to republican status. However, when the matter came to referendum vote in 1999, republicans divided over how radical their intended change should be. With many other Australians still attached to traditional and even monarchical sentiment, the referendum failed decisively.

The premierships of Kevin Rudd (2007–10 and 2013) and Julia Gillard (2010–13)

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Following four consecutive electoral wins, John Howard and the Liberal-National coalition were swept from power with the November 2007 election victory of Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party. Under Rudd, Labor advocated proactive domestic policies to preserve the environment, to improve education, public hospitals, and the country’s infrastructure, and to establish a fair and flexible work environment for all Australians. Rudd also favoured a plan to extricate Australian soldiers from Iraq, where they had been assisting in the U.S.-led war effort. In a historic address on February 13, 2008, Rudd issued a formal apology to Aboriginal peoples for abuses they had suffered under early Australian administrations.

On February 7, 2009, Australians were profoundly shaken by a series of bushfires (the result of soaring temperatures, drought-desiccated vegetation, and gale-force winds) that swept through Victoria, killing 173 people and injuring some 500 others and destroying numerous homes. The most deadly of these “Black Saturday” bushfires was sparked by a faulty power pole near the township of Kilmore East, 37 miles (60 km) north of Melbourne. That conflagration alone claimed 121 lives. A massive rescue effort was undertaken across the state, with thousands of volunteers helping to shelter and provide for the survivors and the families of the victims. When, in August, the Royal Commission released its 360-page interim report on the tragedy, it was highly critical of many aspects of Victoria’s emergency service agencies.

In 2009 the linchpin of Rudd’s environmental initiative, the Emissions Trading Scheme, failed to gain passage, and, when he withdrew the legislation in 2010, his action was criticized in some quarters as timid. Rudd’s hold on power was further threatened by strident opposition from business groups to the controversial Resource Super Profits Tax, a proposal targeted at the mining industry and scheduled to go into effect in 2012. Support for Rudd within the Labor Party waned so much that he did not even contest a leadership vote in June 2010 in which Julia Gillard replaced him as party leader. She became Australia’s first woman prime minister.

Shortly after taking office, Gillard called for a new election, which took place in late August (see Australian federal election of 2010). The results were extremely close, and neither Labor nor the Liberals won an outright majority in the House of Representatives. Labor ultimately secured the backing of several independent and Green members of Parliament, allowing Gillard to form a minority government in early September.

Gillard’s terms as Labor Party leader and prime minister were tumultuous. The popularity of both Gillard and her party declined in the following years. In June 2013 Gillard called for a leadership vote in the Labor Party, and she was defeated by Rudd. Gillard then resigned as prime minister and was succeeded by Rudd. Labor Party infighting, a slowing national economy, and controversy over the government’s immigration policy contributed to Labor’s continuing slippage in public approval, and Rudd’s tenure as prime minister lasted only a matter of months. In the September 7 general election the Liberal-National coalition, led by Liberal party chief Tony Abbott, was swept to victory. Rudd then announced that he would resign as head of his party, though he retained his seat in Parliament.

The premierships of Tony Abbott (2013–15) and Malcolm Turnbull (2015–18)

As prime minister, Abbott instituted several policies that proved to be popular with many Australians, including the turning away of boats carrying asylum seekers and giving approved refugees only temporary, three-year visas. He also repealed taxes on greenhouse-gas emitters and on profits from iron ore and coal mining. As his administration went on, however, his other economic policies and his social conservatism drew criticism, and his administration suffered from low opinion-poll ratings. A party leadership challenge from Malcolm Turnbull on September 14, 2015, resulted in Abbott’s defeat, and the following day Turnbull became Australia’s 29th prime minister. During his first year in office, the conservatives suffered a loss in popularity but managed to retain a narrow majority in the July 2016 federal elections, and Turnbull remained prime minister.

Turnbull’s single-seat majority gave him little room to maneuver on policy, and his moderate stance on social issues left him open to challenge from his party’s conservative wing. Nevertheless, he oversaw robust economic growth that was accompanied by low inflation, low unemployment, and a booming housing market. In November 2017 Australian voters voiced their support for the legalization of same-sex marriage in a nonbinding postal referendum. Turnbull pledged that his government would work to revise Australia’s Marriage Amendment Act 2004, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman, and in December 2017 Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of marriage equality.

Turnbull’s support sagged in 2018, however, as the populist anti-immigration One Nation party peeled voters from the Liberals’ right wing while the Centre Alliance carved into its moderate faction. The vulnerability of the prime minister was cast into relief when he was forced to drop a controversial emissions-reduction scheme on August 20, 2018. Turnbull had been toppled as Liberal leader in 2009 over a similar row about climate policy, and the move triggered a week of dramatic maneuvering within the top ranks of the party. On August 21 Turnbull survived a leadership challenge by his home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, and the following day he abandoned a corporate tax-cut bill that had been a key plank of the Liberals’ 2016 election platform. The intraparty revolt came to a head on August 24, when Turnbull stepped down under pressure; for the fourth time in less than a decade, an Australian prime minister had been ousted by his or her own party. Conservatives aligned behind Scott Morrison, the treasurer in Turnbull’s cabinet, and Morrison narrowly defeated Dutton in an intraparty vote to become party leader and prime minister of Australia.

The premiership of Scott Morrison (2018–22)

When an independent candidate won the by-election to fill Turnbull’s vacated seat in the House of Representatives in October 2018, the ruling Liberal-National coalition lost its narrow majority, and Morrison found himself leading a minority government. Under Morrison’s stewardship the Australian economy continued to prosper, but it was increasingly threatened by the deteriorating housing market. The Labor Party, led by Bill Shorten, argued that the benefits of the robust economy had not been shared across Australian society, and it was critical of the coalition’s energy policy and approach to climate change, especially in the wake of an epidemic of drought-sparked bushfires, along with the recent spate of cyclones and flooding. Labor entered the May 2019 federal elections with a commanding lead in preference polling, but Morrison and the coalition scored a stunning victory to maintain power.

Many observers blamed the effects of climate change when hugely destructive bushfires raged throughout Australia, beginning in September 2019. Record heat, protracted drought, high winds, lightning, and scattered incidences of arson all contributed to a widespread rash of fires that affected every Australian state and continued into early 2020. Some 17.9 million acres (7.3 million hectares) had burned countrywide by the first week of January, and more than two dozen people had lost their lives. In New South Wales alone, more than 12 million acres (about 5 million hectares) caught fire.

In March 2021, climate change also appeared to have intensified the effects of the La Niña weather pattern that typically increases rainfall as well as cyclone activity, and eastern Australia was hammered with a prolonged deluge of rain that produced extensive destructive flooding, especially in New South Wales, where some 18,000 individuals were evacuated.

In between these two catastrophic weather events, life in Australia was profoundly altered by the spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which had emerged in China in December 2019 and caused a global pandemic by March 2020. Largely as a result of the government’s early aggressive response to the pandemic, including stringent lockdown and social-distancing measures, widespread testing, and carefully coordinated contact tracing, Australia weathered the public health crisis much better than most countries. By March 2021 fewer than 30,000 Australians had contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, and just over 900 had died from its complications, though Victoria and Melbourne in particular were harder hit than the rest of the country. By comparison, at the same juncture, the disease had brought about the deaths of nearly 540,000 people in the United States and nearly 300,000 in Brazil, according to the World Health Organization.

Because the government’s stringent “COVID zero” approach to the pandemic had succeeded in keeping the spread of the virus more or less in check, initially there was limited public concern at the relatively slow rollout of Australia’s vaccination program, which was tied principally to the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca. That reliance on a single vaccine became problematic when supply issues arose and was further complicated by the emergence of rare but troubling side effects caused by the vaccine. The slow pace of the vaccination rollout (dubbed “the stroll out” by critics) transformed into a major issue in June 2021 with the appearance and rapid spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which exposed the susceptibility of “Fortress Australia” and prompted the Morrison government to refocus its prevention efforts on vaccination. In July the prime minister announced a four-phase plan aimed at returning the country to normal life. The plan tied the removal of quarantine requirements and international travel restrictions and the possibility of new lockdowns to the achievement of a series of vaccination targets.

Even though Australia’s vaccination rate had skyrocketed to exceed 90 percent by January 2022, the country was shaken by the arrival of another, more contagious version of the virus: the Omicron variant, which resulted in record levels of infections and raised the number of COVID-19-related deaths in Australia to more than 2,700. Nevertheless, by February it too had abated, and Morrison announced that the country was ready to enter the final phase of the return to normal, in which, he said, the coronavirus would be tantamount to the flu. In the wake of the Omicron wave, however, public support for Morrison’s handling of the pandemic declined precipitously, which was good news for Anthony Albanese, who had become leader of the Labor Party following the 2019 election and who was preparing his party to challenge the ruling coalition in the national election Morrison called in April for May 21.

The premiership of Anthony Albanese (2022– )

In many ways the election unfolded as a personality contest between Albanese, who shifted his longtime left-leaning orientation toward the centre and conducted a “small target” campaign that avoided espousing controversial policies, and Morrison, whose forceful governing style had come to be seen by many Australians as inflexible if not autocratic. Yet, as polling day approached, neither candidate enjoyed high approval ratings with a public that appeared to be increasingly disenchanted with the major parties. A groundswell of local activism produced a raft of community-recruited independent candidates—many of them women—whose issue-oriented campaigns centred on gender equity, government accountability, and especially the belief that an aggressive response to climate change was imperative. This so-called “teal wave” of candidates posed a particular threat to Liberal incumbents in well-heeled suburban districts. When the votes were counted, Labor had displaced the Liberal-National coalition from power by capturing 77 seats (compared with 58 for the coalition, a loss of 18 seats) to form a majority government headed by Albanese. The results also reflected a strong showing by independents, who took a dozen seats, and the Green Party, which added three seats to reach a total representation of four seats.

In September 2022, in a significant victory for Labor, legislation was enacted that set the goal of a 43 percent emissions reduction by 2030. New reporting and monitoring mechanisms were also established. Other initiatives introduced by the Albanese government involved subsidized childcare, care for the aged, paid leave for victims of domestic violence, and reduction in the cost of medicine.

High on the government’s agenda was conducting a referendum on whether the Australian constitution should be altered to formally recognize Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples and to create an Indigenous body, the “Voice to Parliament,” to advise the government on policies that affect them. Held in October 2023, it was the first referendum staged in Australia in more than two decades. To pass it required assent from a majority of voters nationwide as well as majorities in at least four states. Supporters, including the prime minister, hoped that adoption of the proposal would be a significant step toward reconciliation between the country’s non-Indigenous majority and the Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples; opponents, mainly conservatives, argued that the proposal was unnecessary and lacking in details. In the vote, some 60 percent of those who participated rejected the proposal, and it failed to gain majority support in all six states. The result was a defeat for the Albanese government and a stunning blow for the country’s Indigenous people.