Shifting the economic base
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The development of mining at Broken Hill in New South Wales in the 1880s generated new activity in South Australia, but the economy remained dependent on a narrow rural base. The local market was too small to sustain rapid development of the manufacturing industry, and economic diversification was slow to materialize. Hence, for many decades South Australia’s economic growth rate fell behind those of other parts of the continent. Its rate of population growth, once the highest in Australia, also lagged. The population retreated from outlying districts, concentrating increasingly around Adelaide. After 1921 a rising majority of South Australians lived in metropolitan Adelaide; by 1961 only 12 percent of the workforce was employed in rural industries.
Poor economic growth from the turn of the 20th century until the late 1920s was associated with worsening budget deficits, migration to other states, and then severe drought at the end of the 1920s. During the Great Depression of the 1930s there was serious distress in both city and country, and South Australia suffered worse unemployment than most of Australia. The depression threatened to extinguish the infant industrial growth that had emerged in the 1920s, and there was a particular danger that South Australia’s automobile industry would be lost entirely to Victoria. The state government intervened and offered exceptional advantages to industries that would become established and stay in the state. Recovery in the late 1930s sustained the foundations for accelerated industrialization in the Adelaide region during World War II (1939–45). Heavy industry at Broken Hill and Whyalla emerged strongly, and munitions factories were developed near Adelaide.
The growth of war-related industries was translated into broader industrialization after the war, when the economy expanded rapidly and the state adopted a vigorous immigration program. Industrialization was undertaken through a combination of private and public enterprise, the state taking over responsibility for much of the basic infrastructure of the new economy and for the attraction of external capital. Premier Thomas Playford was a vigorous salesman for the business prospects of South Australia, emphasizing its lower wage costs, cheaper housing and land prices, lower taxes, and better industrial relations. He promoted the state operation of basic utilities, including electricity (in 1946 his government took over the private Adelaide Electric Supply Company), coal supply, housing, water, schools, and hospitals. Government enterprise also promoted the rural sector by means of soil improvement with trace elements and through new settlement schemes. A satellite town at Elizabeth was created for the further development of the industrial-urban base of the state’s economy.
Between 1947 and 1954 population growth in South Australia was again faster than elsewhere in Australia. It was surprising that South Australia, a relatively small community on the southern fringe of the continent, far from the larger markets and population centres of eastern Australia, was able to sustain such a vigorous program of industrial development. But the long upswing in economic activity began to weaken in the 1970s. South Australia followed the path of many other industrial economies in the last decades of the century, and the proportion of the population employed in manufacturing fell below 10 percent in the early 21st century. There was a concurrent shift of the workforce into service activities. The government placed great emphasis on promoting high-technology growth in the economy and attracting imported capital connected with high value-added industries. Its efforts to recruit industry often emphasized the stability of the workforce and the high quality and relative cheapness of living standards.
Population history
The Aboriginal population may have been about 25,000 at the time of British colonization. Well-intentioned government policies to protect their interests were rarely given practical effect, and the combined impact of introduced diseases, loss of land, and falling fertility rates accelerated the decline in numbers. By 1860, colonial opinion fatalistically expected the Aborigines to die out within a few decades. In fact, there was a resurgence of their numbers, if not of their status and economic condition, probably assisted by intermarriage with colonists. Government policies shifted toward assimilation by the 1960s. Only then were South Australian Aborigines accorded full citizenship. Aboriginal land rights became an active political issue in the 1970s.
The white population began with large infusions of immigrants, many from the southern parts of England. South Australia’s population increased fivefold between 1844 and 1855, but the colony attracted relatively fewer Irish and Scottish than the rest of Australia. There was a secondary inflow of Germans, whose descendants faced considerable persecution and loss of rights during World War I (1914–18). New immigration programs were instituted in the 1850s and ’70s and before and after World War I. Larger inflows from 1945 to 1965 brought many immigrants from continental Europe, notably from Italy, Greece, Poland, and Yugoslavia and later from Southeast Asia. These later waves of immigration substantially altered the formerly homogeneous character of the population.
At other times population growth was disappointing. There were outflows of South Australians in the early 1850s and in the 1880s, 1930s, and 1970s and ’80s. Moreover, the rates of natural increase generally declined, and birth rates fell below national levels and eventually below the level of net reproduction. Mortality rates also have fallen, however, and South Australia’s infant mortality rate is among the lowest in the world.
Political characteristics
From the start, South Australians had an unusually progressive attitude toward social experimentation. The early colonists expected a swift transition to self-government and to popular representation. The colony’s initial commitment to religious toleration attracted a disproportionate number (though never a majority) of Nonconformists, especially Methodists. Their collective influence was most evident in the lively public debates about the role of state support for education. In the 1850s South Australia became the first colony in the British Empire to disestablish religion (thereby separating church and state).
The decisive intervention of the British government into colonial affairs during the financial crisis of 1841–42 curbed the experimental pretensions of the colonists and checked their progress toward self-government. Nevertheless, during the 1850s there was a renewal of the original zeal. In 1851 partial self-government was introduced, and the Legislative Council was reformed to include two-thirds elected membership, based on a property franchise. Pressure for greater autonomy mounted, and in 1856 South Australia instituted some of the most advanced arrangements in the empire. These included triennial parliaments, manhood suffrage, the absence of property qualifications for the lower house, and secret ballots.
Thus, South Australia had established a relatively advanced democratic bicameral government, and its first election on this basis was held in 1857, when the European population was roughly 110,000. But its subsequent legislative record was less exciting than its conception. Some historians say that South Australia had lost its experimental and intellectual zest and that it was not recovered until the last part of the 20th century.
In 1884 South Australia was the first colony in Australia to introduce direct taxes on income and land. This reflected not so much advanced redistributive philosophies, however, but rather recurrent overspending by the government on public works programs and an excessive reliance on the London capital market.
Progress toward popular representation was curiously fitful. There were remarkable accelerations, as in 1894, when, in advance of virtually all other democracies, South Australia extended the vote to women; the Women’s Suffrage League, which included among its leaders Mary Lee, Mary Colton, and Catherine Helen Spence, was instrumental to this achievement. Yet South Australia was slow to vote women into parliament. In 1973 full adult suffrage was accomplished when property qualifications for the upper house were finally abolished. Payment to members of parliament was introduced in 1887. In 1876 South Australia became the first of the Australian colonies to give legal recognition to trade unions. Unionization nevertheless was slow to develop, and there were generally fewer and less damaging strikes in South Australia than elsewhere in Australia.
Political parties became more clearly defined when leaders emerged to represent the urban and working population. The formation of the United Labor Party in 1891 was a prelude to the first fielding of Labor candidates in elections. This precursor of the contemporary Australian Labor Party became the dominant vehicle for the interests of the left. Partly in response to Labor, conservative elements notably converged into the Liberal and Country League in 1932.
The conservative party was generally dominant, and it ruled from 1933 to 1965. For the last 28 years of that period Thomas Playford was premier. During the Playford era the state was transformed from a mainly agricultural economy with a population of 600,000 to a predominantly industrial society with more than 1,000,000 people. The Liberals retained power through an electoral system that grossly underrepresented metropolitan Adelaide. By the 1960s it was generally, but not unanimously, agreed that the electoral system was the most unbalanced in Australia and had become a political scandal. Opposition to the system became vociferous but was resisted until 1969, when the Liberal government initiated electoral reform despite great internal controversy. When Labor attained power, more thoroughgoing legislation was introduced to redistribute voting power toward the metropolitan population. In 1975 electoral readjustments became the responsibility of a permanent Electoral Commission.
The Playford administration was marked by two extraordinary paradoxes. Under the direction of the auditor-general, J.W. Wainwright, Playford committed the Liberals to state-induced industrialization, in contravention of conventional conservative doctrine. This helped to reinforce the influence of state policy in shaping local society, in opposition to the powerful influences emanating from the federal centre in Canberra. The resulting expansion of the urban and industrial population effectively undermined the electoral foundations of the Liberal Party itself.
Except for two years of a Liberal-Country coalition government (1968–70), the Labor Party held sway from 1965 to 1993. Under Premier Donald Dunstan’s administration, South Australia became highly image-conscious, especially in its commitment to culture. Dunstan pledged to make the state the technological, design, social reform, and artistic centre of Australia. Dunstan’s program depended on the affluence connected with industrialization. This affluence had, however, in its turn depended on high levels of effective protection for the local motor vehicle, household appliance, shipping, and electrical goods industries, a large proportion of the products of which was traded outside the state.
Sustained economic growth until 1977 favoured the political program, and unemployment rates in South Australia were lower than in the rest of Australia. But the employment base was relatively narrow and vulnerable to market shifts. During the 1980s and ’90s South Australia suffered greater than average reductions in the level of economic activity, and a growing nervousness affected the business climate of the state. In the last years of Dunstan’s tenure and during the administration of his successor, John Bannon, industrialization seemed to falter as tariff protection became less comprehensive. Earlier advantages diminished, and employment in the manufacturing sector fell. Plans to build a new city at Monarto, near Murray Bridge, were shelved. The state government became more receptive to plans for the exploitation not only of natural gas fields but also of the extraordinary ore bodies around Olympic Dam. Since these ore bodies contained rich uranium reserves, the mining policy of the government became a matter of great political controversy, especially in the Australian Labor Party.
Under Dunstan there had been a rush of adventurous legislation easing censorship and restrictions on liquor, gambling, and shopping hours; extending the vote to 18-year-olds; permitting beach nudity; and reforming the law relating to adult homosexuality. But social experimentation decelerated as the government attempted to consolidate the industrial base of the economy. Under Bannon in the early 1990s, plans were advanced to facilitate large-scale international investment in an elaborate scheme incorporating high technology into the metropolitan area, known as “the multifunction polis.”
The Labor Party, much strengthened by the long-term impact of electoral reform, redefined its relationship with the trade unions while appealing to the middle strata of South Australian society for electoral support. This was emulated by a reunited Liberal Party and by a small coalition called the Australian Democrats that briefly held the balance of parliamentary power several times in the 1980s. Despite the vicissitudes of the state economy, there was no weakening of the central commitment to the parliamentary system of representative democracy.
Having been ascendant for nearly two decades under Dunstan and Bannon, the Labor Party’s popularity declined abruptly in the early 1990s in tandem with the collapse of the State Bank, which had accrued a significant debt as a result of ambitious lending strategies. In the 1993 election the party experienced its heaviest defeat in 60 years. The new Liberal government committed itself to a reduced role in the economy. It privatized many public utilities and sold the State Bank.
The state economy was in the doldrums throughout the 1990s, with higher unemployment and lower economic growth than the national average. However, during that time South Australia sought new growth opportunities in the information technology industry and in exports, and grain and wine exports expanded vigorously. Nevertheless, the state’s recovery from recession was slower than that of the rest of the country, despite the implementation of debt-reduction policies. Expansion in the mining industry at Olympic Dam and large expenditures by the federal government on the construction of new naval submarines at Port Adelaide helped buoy the economy, and a new consortium emerged in 1999 that also brought trade benefits, employment, and new demand for steel production at Whyalla. By the end of the decade, wine, motor vehicles, grains, seafood, and electronics were all exporting well, and strong economic recovery was under way.
Although severe drought reduced agricultural yields in the early 21st century, the state continued to grow in other areas; in 2004 the long-anticipated rail link between Darwin in the Northern Territory and Adelaide, a grand national project first mooted in the 19th century, was finally completed.The Liberals were defeated in the election of 2002, which presaged the return of a Labor government. In 2004 Labor, under Mike Rann, issued a strategic plan focusing on economic development and improvements in health and education over the coming decade. Rann also persuaded the Labor Party to adopt a more positive attitude toward uranium mining.
Rann served as premier until 2011, when Jay Weatherill took over as party leader and premier. The Labor government made a big commitment to fostering the growth of renewable energy, and by 2014–15 it had already surpassed its 2020 target goal of providing 33 percent of energy production through renewable sources. The state’s increasing dependence on the unpredictable availability of wind and solar power and its occasional reliance on power drawn from the national grid, however, sometimes resulted in energy shortages that necessitated rolling blackouts. Prolonged blackouts in February and March 2017 raised howls of criticism and proposals to develop extensive battery-storage capabilities to prevent the need for blackouts as a recourse.
Eric Stapleton Richards The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica