Elections are times when all Australians feel most immediately affected by politics. Stories about politics lead every radio and television news broadcast and provide front-page stories in newspapers. Political bloggers become more active. Advertisements appear regularly in the electronic and print media. Posters promoting candidates spring up overnight in our neighbourhoods. For those of us who study politics, elections are also some of the most interesting and engaging times. Everyone’s attention starts to turn to politics, whether we like it or not.

One of the most intriguing features of elections for political scientists, casual observers and participants alike is their uncertainty. Every election has the potential to confirm existing political patterns, to open up new political possibilities, or to do a bit of both. This theme of contending electoral possibilities was well captured in the title of the first major Australian study of electoral behaviour, Don Aitkin’s (1982) Stability and Change in Australian Politics. Some 30 years on, this part of our book demonstrates that debates over the extent, character, causes and consequences of electoral stability and change in Australia are very much alive.

This chapter addresses a central question for Australian political science: can political scientists use the same theories to explain Australian domestic politics and Australia’s international activities, or do they need different theories to understand each sphere? As the chapter shows, the answer depends to some extent on which theories political scientists adopt to explain domestic and international politics. Realists, for example, point to the absence of a world government to claim that the fundamental problem of international politics – anarchy – is different from the problems raised by domestic political systems with legitimate governments. On the other hand, as a comparison of this chapter with Chapters 4 and 5 will show, Marxists, feminists and discourse theorists use many of the same concepts and approaches to understand domestic politics and international politics. The connections between liberal international relations theory and institutionalism (Chapter 3) will also become obvious to careful readers. Finally, this chapter reiterates the point, made in Chapter 1, that many domestic policy issues are affected but not determined by international power relations.

The events following the 2010 federal election threw many of the issues raised in this chapter into stark relief. A hung parliament – which meant that a group of Independents became crucial to a formation of a government (or political executive) – made it clear that members of the lower house of parliament select or elect the executive. This has been obscured by strict party discipline, which – as Norman Abjorensen and John Uhr discuss in Chapter 19 – has meant the federal parliament has had limited independence, especially from the political executive. Among the demands presented to the rivals for government by the three Independents were some that were directed towards increasing parliament’s capacity to scrutinise the actions of members of the political executive, and hold them accountable.

The fact that parliamentary leaders have become the focal points of campaigning and party control has shifted power even further. Once the control that the party exerted over parliament was concentrated in the hands of the party leader, the control of parliament – and the executive itself – moved further towards the prime minister. As Paul Strangio suggests in Chapter 20, this has led to the emergence of prime ministerial governance. The reversal of this process after the 2010 election allowed Independents to force a caretaker prime minister and her ministers, an opposition leader and his shadow ministers, and senior public servants to explain and justify the policies and budget that would be introduced by a Labor or Liberal–National Coalition government.

John Curtin remains an iconic figure in Australian political history. Were there ever to be an Australian equivalent to America's Mt Rushmore – the monumental sculpture on the South Dakota mountainside that features the faces of four American presidents carved in stone – Curtin would arguably be the first face hewn from the rock. Alone among 20th century Australian prime ministers, with the possible exception of Gough Whitlam, he has become a venerated leader. The words chiselled into the simple obelisk that sits atop his grave in Karrakatta Cemetery, Perth – His Country was his Pride, His Brother Man his Cause – proclaim a simple and moving record of his service to party and nation, as if the visitor or passer-by is being summoned to honour Curtin: Australian patriot and tribune of the people. As the Westralian Worker put it following his funeral in July 1945, ‘Every Australian who believes in his country has lost a friend’.

That he died in office has only added to the Curtin mystique: a politician who put ideology aside to lead the nation in war; an alcoholic who turned sober; a timid, nervous individual who became master and commander; and ultimately, a leader who became a casualty of the war itself. In the speeches of his admirers and adorers, the transformation in Curtin is easily transferred to the nation – in changing himself, so runs the myth, he changed Australia. Hence, the continued attachment to the idea that the 1940s represents a golden age in Australia: inaugurating a new departure in its relations with the world and the assertion of a more authentically robust national image. Curtin's record as an Australian ‘nationalist’ remains the most powerful impulse sustaining his place in the collective memory. The assumption that he not only initiated Australia's exit from its British orbit but also founded the alliance with the United States – establishing ‘nothing less than a charter for the next half-century’ to quote Bob Hawke – has a tenacious grip on the Labor imagination. And it is likely to stay that way.

As John Curtin embarked on a career in federal politics in the early 1930s, he faced not only serious international instability but also a fractious labour movement that wanted to ignore the world. In the worsening economic and strategic climate, the tensions that had surfaced in party ranks in the aftermath of the First World War came under even greater strain. Although in the early years of the decade the severity of the worldwide depression inevitably focussed Curtin's attention on the domestic misery associated with high unemployment and the rapid collapse in Australia's export trade, neither he nor his party – however much they might have wanted to – could turn a blind eye to the troubles besetting Europe and East Asia. As imperial Japan flexed its muscles in Manchuria, Nazi Germany violated the resolutions of the Paris Peace Conference and Fascist Italy defied the League of Nations, Australians began to see once again the gathering clouds of another world war and with it the dreaded prospect of Britain being engaged in a simultaneous war in Europe and the Pacific. On the cusp of becoming Labor leader in 1935, Curtin said that he could see only a ‘deranged world’ where ‘all of the visible portents are of evil’.

In April 1942 John Curtin made one of his many broadcasts to the people of Britain, a call of solidarity from the leader of a loyal dominion to the war-weary population of the ‘mother-country’. In this ‘comradely message of united endeavour’ from the Australian labour movement to its British counterpart, he drew on the imagery of Britannic nationalism, invoking a shared language and lineage, history and heritage. The workers of Australia were as one with their ideological soul mates in the United Kingdom, and the ‘British land’ of Australia remained the beacon for a ‘better and freer’ Britain. The broader message was simple and irrefutable: when the war challenged Australia to define itself in a world of nations, Curtin replied at once, defining Australians as a British people and the nation as a proud and integral part of a united Empire. A fortnight later, he remarked in another broadcast that ‘We are practical Empire patriots, and practical democrats’. By laying the stress on the ‘practical’ he was giving voice to a language of Britishness that Labor could make its own, one which underlined the benefits to Australia and avoided the flowery imperial oratory for which he had no patience. He even lauded the fact that Australia had been ‘the first Empire people to send their men away from their shores to fight for the Empire’, words unthinkable for a Labor leader to have even contemplated uttering in the 1930s. Over the course of his wartime prime ministership, as he wrestled with the demands of office, John Curtin sought to give an even more definitive form to this idea of practical imperial fraternity.

In June 2008 Julia Gillard, then deputy prime minister, addressed a gathering of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue in Washington DC. Speaking in the lavish State Department dining room that overlooks the Lincoln Memorial, Gillard drew on the familiar rhetoric of shared values and common interests that define the relationship between Australia and the United States. The occasion was widely seen as her debut on the foreign policy stage – a chance to show the supposed ‘movers and shakers’ of the alliance and the Washington power elite that she had the necessary mettle to handle international affairs. When Gillard took over from Kevin Rudd as prime minister two years later, it was the text of this speech to which many journalists and analysts turned to try and discern what her prime ministership might mean for the direction of Australian foreign policy.

Gillard's speech traversed the traditional terrain of cultural exchange and shared military sacrifice. She recalled the cooperation between Australian and American soldiers on the Western Front in the First World War, and emphasised that Australia had been the only country to fight alongside America at every major conflict since. But her words were securely anchored to the memory and legacy of a Labor hero, the former party leader and prime minister, John Curtin. Gillard was keen to point out that the ANZUS alliance, though officially signed in 1951, ‘reflected the judgments – clear, accurate, brutally frank judgments – of an Australian Labor Prime Minister a decade earlier’. Conceding that her audience would be all too ‘familiar with John Curtin's declaration in December 1941 about the need for Australia to “look to America”’ for its national security, Gillard instead quoted the words he had spoken on the day following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. She recalled that during an evening broadcast on 8 December 1941, the prime minister had explained to the people of Australia the imperative to defend the continent ‘“as a place where civilisation will persist”’. Gillard's speech was apparently well received by those present, and it attracted warm endorsements from the Australian press. Paul Kelly declared that the deputy prime minister had been ‘inducted into the political culture and rituals of the alliance’ and could now be counted one of its ‘true believer(s)’. The Herald's Peter Hartcher joined the chorus of celebration: Gillard's ‘Curtin call’ was an ‘excellent debut’, proving that she ‘has come a long way since the Victorian Socialist Left’. One could almost hear the collective sigh of relief amongst the commentariat: if the leading light of Labor's left-wing could utter such statements, the alliance was in safe hands.

These were the views expressed by John Curtin around the time of the 1927 visit to Australia by the Duke and Duchess of York to open the new Parliament House building in Canberra. Written as the lead editorial in the Westralian Worker, they give voice to a powerful stream in Labor's brand of Britishness – a deep-seated disdain for the trappings and trimmings of imperial loyalty and the privileges of an imperial aristocracy. Here the urge of some in the country to genuflect towards their royal guests or to fuss over the order and opulence of officialdom is derided as deeply offensive to Australia's egalitarian, democratic ethos. By throwing themselves so completely at the regal feet, these Anglophiles were denying the distinctiveness of Australian social ideals and mores and perpetuating the inequalities of the old world in a new land. Curtin clearly found such symbols of class pretension repugnant to his idea of an Australia that stood on its own two feet.