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Premier John Bannon was influential in the development of the State during the 1980s. He combined the Savings Bank of South Australia (founded in 1848) and the State Bank of South Australia (founded in 1896) to form the new State Bank and this was part of a substantial period of expansion in Adelaide. Bannon also created the South Australian Finance Authority to assist the private sector with developments. Further, he brought about the ASER development, despite opposition from the ACC, and in 1985 secured the Grand Prix motor race for Adelaide with the support of the ACC.
However, by the late 1980s there was mounting public criticism that the Bannon Labor Government was failing to deliver major projects. There was a community feeling that the planning system was to blame and the Government believed the existing planning system did not serve the community well. The problem was the philosophy of control behind the City of Adelaide Development Control Act 1976 and the Planning Act 1982. There had been a perception in the 1960s and 1970s that government under Dunstan's influence could bring about change and achieve reform through legislation. This attitude had changed and Greg Crafter observed that what was needed was legislation with some vision that empowered communities and facilitated rather than controlled development.
This chapter examines the period from May 1987, when Steve Condous was first elected as Lord Mayor. I also review the decline in the status and importance of the City of Adelaide Planning Commission (CAPC). Jim Jarvis maintained the informal ACC convention of not seeking a further term as Lord Mayor and Steve Condous, the senior Alderman, was elected unopposed to the office in May 1987. At this election Jim Jarvis, John Watson and Bill Manos all retired from the ACC. Thus, there was a considerable loss of knowledge and expertise about planning the City and the ACC's governance arrangements with the State. Condous was first elected as a Councillor for the south-west of the City in 1968 and had served on various ACC committees, but he had not been involved in any of the strategic discussions with the State about the governance of the City.
Condous was appointed as Chairman of the CAPC in July 1987. Ian McPhail, Derek Scrafton, Judith Brine and Rob Nichols remained as the State members. Table 6 shows key individuals who had influence during the period from May 1987.
The main focus of this Book is the period from 1972 until 1993 when the City of Adelaide had its own system of planning and development control. The author, Michael Llewellyn-Smith, is in a unique position to provide insights into this time in the City's history as he was the City Planner from September 1974 until December 1981; a Commissioner of the City of Adelaide Planning Commission from March 1977 until December 1981, and the Town Clerk (Chief Executive Officer) of Adelaide from January 1982 until December 1993 when the separate system ceased.
Oral history interviews by the author with key people who influenced the development of the City provided valuable information about why the separate system came into effect in 1972, why it continued for twenty one years and why the relevant legislation, the City of Adelaide Development Control Act 1976, was repealed in 1993.
The Book reviews the relationship between the Adelaide City Council and the Provincial (later State) Government from the settlement of the Colony in 1836 and the importance of Colonel William Light's plan for the City.
It is significant that the Parliament established a joint Capital City Committee under the City of Adelaide Act 1998. This Committee continues an intergovernmental partnership between the Council and the State to develop the capital city through a unified strategic direction.
There is considerable political background to the choice of George Clarke & Urban Systems Corporation (USC) as the consultants to prepare the City of Adelaide Planning Study. For example, Clarke attended the RAPI Conference in Brisbane in September 1972 and met with Premier Don Dunstan when Dunstan was critical of the SPA and advised that he was considering a different planning approach for Adelaide.
Darrel Conybeare was working in the Sydney office of USC when the ACC was seeking consultants for the Adelaide Planning Study. Clarke gave Conybeare the job of going to Adelaide to talk to Hugh Stretton as Conybeare's father was a close friend of Professor George Duncan at the University of Adelaide's History Department where Stretton was based. Conybeare and Stretton had many discussions, and Conybeare gained some very useful insights in terms of pitching the response to the consultant brief. Stretton's influence is clear, as he advised Conybeare to address three issues. First, the importance of housing, especially low cost housing as provided by the SAHT. Second, the importance of the Park Lands and how to minimise the inroads into them by eliminating unnecessary pathways and roads to create larger broad sweeps of open Park Lands. Third, there was a need to reinforce the heritage of Light's plan for Adelaide.
The City of Adelaide Development Control Act 1976 and the City of Adelaide Plan 1976–81 came into force on 1 March 1977. The agreement between the ACC and the State for the governance of the City under the Act contained a number of elements. The ACC would manage the City as a series of four Districts (Core, Inner Frame, Outer frame and Residential) containing 23 Precincts, as Figure 30 shows. These were as recommended by George Clarke and USC in the City of Adelaide Planning Study 1974. For each Precinct there was a ‘Desired Future Character Statement’, which was an innovative qualitative statutory control. From 1977 until 1982 there were a number of key individuals from the State and the ACC who where influential in the planning of the City, as Table 3 shows.
The ACC and the State were committed to a process of review and the adoption of a new City Plan on a five-yearly cycle with an integration of strategic and statutory approaches. This would provide certainty for the community during the first three years of the operation of the City Plan. But after a review in years four and five, with public involvement, a new City Plan would be adopted.
Contemporary Politics in Australia provides a lively and wide-ranging introduction to the study of Australian politics. Written by a diverse range of experts, the book offers a comprehensive overview of current theories, debates and research in Australian political science and looks forward to new developments. It encompasses not only formal and institutionally based politics, but also the informal politics of everyday life, including the politics of Australian culture and media. The book is divided into six key sections that cover:political theorypolitics in everyday Australian lifeelectionsparticipation and representationthe Australian statecontemporary political and public policy issuesContemporary Politics in Australia challenges the assumption that the study of Australian politics can be dry, descriptive or uncontroversial. Rather, it encourages an understanding of politics in Australia as contested ground. Featuring a glossary of key terms and a companion website, it is essential reading for students.
Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847–1903), writer and social reformer, rose to prominence as one of America's first muckraker journalists. Born in New York City, Lloyd started his journalism career at the Chicago Tribune and went on to expose the abuse of power in American oil companies. He also pursued a career in politics. In 1899 he travelled to New Zealand and Australia, the 'political laboratories' of Great Britain, to investigate how they resolved the conflict between organised capital and organised labour, and how they promoted social welfare. This book, published in 1900, praises New Zealand's system of compulsory arbitration and describes many instances of successful dispute resolution, from clothing manufacture to newspaper typesetting. The book includes an introduction by William Pember Reeves (1857–1932), liberal newspaper editor and writer, who as New Zealand's minister of labour had brought in the Arbitration Act of 1894 and other important labour legislation.
William Pember Reeves' scholarly work of 1902 provides a full and candid account of radical and experimental laws in Australia and New Zealand. From the Anti-Chinese Acts of 1881 to the adoption of the women's franchise by the Commonwealth Parliament in Australia in 1902, the two volumes survey all noteworthy laws and statutes, addressing colonial questions of the time. Well-known for his history of New Zealand, The Long White Cloud (1898), the statesman Reeves (1857–1932) draws attention to admitted defects or failures in the laws without imposing his personal political views on the reader. Volume 2 covers areas including labour and factory laws, pensions, liquor and licensing laws and immigration issues. Overall, the two volumes represent an important record of the many reforms and changes occurring in the political and social systems of Australasia at this time.
John Curtin remains a venerated leader. His role as Labor's wartime supremo is etched deep into the national psyche: the man who put Australia first, locked horns with Churchill, forged the alliance with the United States and became the saviour of the nation in its darkest hour. Drawing on new archival material including sensitive and private correspondence from Curtin never before seen or quoted, Curtin's Empire shows that this British world vision was not imposed on him from abroad, rather it animated Curtin from deep within. Since entering politics Curtin had fought a bitter battle with his opponents - both inside and outside his party - over loyalty, identity and national security. At stake was how he and his party related to the defining idea of Australian politics for their times: Britishness.
This chapter, more than any other in this book, applies some of the insights drawn from discourse theories outlined in Chapter 5 to Australian politics. The chapter does not deny the reality of deep material inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians (see Chapter 4), or the impact of political institutions (Chapter 2), or the consequences of the behaviour of bureaucrats, politicians and others (Chapter 3). Its argument is that these factors can be understood through the construction and circulation of a discourse of crisis that promotes the continuation of failed policy approaches. The chapter refers briefly to the way in which such a discourse has circulated internationally (see Chapter 6). It then canvasses alternative discourses and policies developed by Indigenous leaders and communities. The interpretation presented here suggests the need, among other things, for a rethinking of Indigenous representation and participation in Australian democracy (see Chapter 1).
Recently, it has become common to speak of a crisis in Australian Indigenous affairs. Such ‘crisis talk’ is mobilised by individual Indigenous and non-Indigenous commentators, community leaders, politicians and bureaucrats, as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations and agencies charged with the duties of program management and service delivery to Indigenous communities. There appears to be no argument that, in relation to Indigenous communities – especially in the remote parts of Australia – there is a crisis unfolding across the continent: a calamitous conjunction of violence, substance abuse and other forms of social dysfunction, all underscored by appalling socio-economic indicators (Yu, Duncan and Gray 2008).
This chapter argues that the ways in which individual citizens engage with politics are changing. It is different to the three previous chapters in this section, as it focuses on individual and thus behavioural change (see Chapter 3), not on how institutions mediate the relationship between the state and society. The chapter argues that broadening our understanding of democracy (see Chapter 1) to focus on both individuals and social movements helps us to engage critically with how politics can be more responsive to the political views and experiences of citizens. As in the last chapter, critical theorists might ask whether this shift results in fundamental socio-economic changes (Chapter 4). To the extent that this broadening of participation might also be the result of, or produce, new discourses of politics, it will be of interest to discourse theorists and post-structuralists (Chapter 5).
Parties are central to the practice of Australian democracy; however, their patterns of competitive behaviour are more closely aligned with some theories of democracy than others (see Chapter 1). Understanding the development and behaviour of political parties within the Australian electoral system is aided by the behaviouralist approach outlined in Chapter 3, which focuses on the creation of general models of political behaviour backed up by empirical evidence. As suggested by the theories in Chapter 2, the institutional rules of elections provide the political context that enables and constrains the ways parties ‘play the game’. The habitual depiction of the Australian party system as essentially a two-party contest would interest discourse theorists (Chapter 5), not least for the idea that the two-party discourse excludes alternative discourses about how Australian politics might be done. Critical theorists would question whether attention to the party contest really obscures the commitment of all political parties to an underlying pattern of inequality (Chapter 4).
Different democratic theories suggest different approaches to the protection and promotion of particular rights (see Chapter 1). A Bill of Rights has been a common institutional protection in many modern democracies. In Australia, however, contention remains as to whether or not other institutional protections of rights are adequate. Other levels of debate are also evident. While liberal feminists, for example, might welcome the protection of women’s rights in such a Bill (see Chapter 4), other critical theorists would argue that a Bill of Rights can do little to shift fundamental inequalities of class, gender and race in Australia. In any case, the institutional barriers to a Bill of Rights in Australia are strong (see Chapter 2). One of the key hurdles any constitutionally entrenched Bill of Rights would have to clear is the reluctance to support constitutional reform (see Chapter 3) that has been noted in behaviouralist studies of the Australian electorate. A considerable discourse around rights has grown in Australia (see Chapter 5), much of it influenced by international norms (see Chapter 6).
The importance of the role of the media in Australian politics is unquestioned. The media play a crucial role in informing participants in democratic processes, so this chapter has a strong relationship with Chapter 1. The media affect political behaviour (Chapter 3); they are also sometimes taken to be a political institution, reflecting debates about the ways in which political institutions are understood in Chapter 2. Even if they are not considered in this way, the media certainly constitute a site in which dominant discourses are produced or reproduced (see Chapter 5). Their role as an important part of the political process must also be viewed in light of their reproduction or support for the social structures that are critiqued in critical theories (see Chapter 4). The role of media organisations as non-state actors in international politics – representing the world to Australia and Australia to the world – can be understood through the international relations theories discussed in Chapter 6.
A federal system consists of dual sets of political institutions that complicate institutional arrangements in Australia. So they present institutionalists (Chapter 2) with particular challenges and opportunities for analysis. They have been criticised for making it difficult to determine who is responsible for implementing policy, as well as making it harder for voters to punish or reward those in government. On the other hand, they can be defended as creating more opportunities for representation and including a tier of government that is closer to the people. So a consideration of democratic theory (Chapter 1) is one prerequisite for reflecting on the desirability and defensibility of a federal system. At the same time, the behaviour of individuals at each level of government and in intergovernmental interactions provides many opportunities for behaviouralist studies (Chapter 3).