Geoffrey Brennan and Francis G. Castles, eds. - Australia Reshaped

Geoffrey Brennan and Francis G. Castles, eds,

Australia Reshaped: 200 Years of Institutional Transformation.

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Pp. x + 302.                 ISBN  0 521 81749 8 hardback, 0 521 52075 4 paperback.

Australia Reshaped begins with an Introduction by the editors which is unusually critical of the eight essays that follow. The ten contributors have all participated in a decade-long ANU research project on the reshaping of Australian institutions. This volume rounds off the project but does not seek to summarise its achievements. The concept of an institution has been broadly defined. The subtitle is slightly misleading, since most contributions focus on the twentieth century. The editors suggest that the material can be grouped under three headings.

Chapters 2 to 4 deal with the relationship between institutions and external environment. Castles explains why institutions matter, and suggests how Lijphart's typology of democracies can be interpreted to illuminate Australian governmental approaches to welfare provision and wage levels. Brennan and Jonathan Pincus examine economic institutions, arguing that it was always fallacious to assume that governments could control the economic domain, and that globalisation and the long-term decline of commodity prices have merely exposed the pretence. Continuing the theme of globalisation, John Braithwaite contends that Australians have been more successful in the field of government than in the business arena. This he attributes to perennial shortfall factors, first of labour and more recently of imported capital. Australian business has to be persuaded to invest in people through the promotion of social justice, which in turn will require acceptance of a tax system capable of funding the development of human capital.

Chapters 5 to 8 are about 'effective inclusion'. John S. Dryzek takes as his theme the familiar label of ANU seminar series to assess Australian democracy as 'work-in-progress'. From the starting point that modern democratic theory emphasises inclusion, he speculates on ways in which the environment itself might become a 'player' in the process. Intriguingly, he speaks favourably of 'benign exclusion' as a means of making democracy effective. Marian Sawer asks similar questions from the standpoint of women, suggesting that Australian federalism tends to operate in a pro-feminist spirit. Geoffrey Stokes sees three strategies in Aboriginal policy: paternal exclusion, liberal inclusion and indigenous self-determination. Despite its enlightened attractions, the last represents a massive challenge to Aboriginal people themselves, both in defining themselves in a society that disavows racial classification, and in adapting their own structures to relate to European-derived democracy. In one of the few contributions to go back as far as 1788, Martin Krygier seeks to explain why the rule of law emerged from the unlikely background of Australia's convict origins, but failed effectively to include Aboriginal people under its protective umbrella. The imposition of British notions of property involved refusal to recognise any form of Aboriginal title, thereby rendering discriminatory the supposedly equal application of the white man's criminal law.

The editors place the final essay, by John Ure, in a category of its own. He analyses themes in the utterances of three very different Australian leaders, Deakin, Menzies and Keating. At issue here, as Ure accepts, is the role of political rhetoric, prompting the question whether there is a specific prime ministerial style and vocabulary necessary to convey the notion of leadership.

The editors decline to assess the direction of Australia's institutions, still less to recommend how they might be reformed. Instead, they highlight two issues and suggest one thematic continuity in the book. The issues are the centrality of deregulation, and the challenge of Aboriginal inclusion. The first has repercussions well beyond the economic sphere, while the second should be seen less as a specific question of finding the right policies than as part of a larger problem of altering the institutional framework to accommodate indigenous concerns. The underlying theme is the relationship between the elite and the masses, the governed and the governors. There is an element of knowing paternalism in some of the prime concerns voiced in this collection, such as empowerment of the environment, restitution to indigenous people - indeed, the entire role of 'institutions' so defined as to be independent of real people. Democracy is not necessarily wise, and wisdom does not always appeal to the masses. There may be a larger role for populist rhetoric here than it seems.