Government, law and citizenship

Abstract

There are clear trends across the fields of government, law and citizenship in twentieth-century Australia, and significant convergence in the arcs they trace. The century began with innovation, to a large extent associated with the act of Federation itself and the task of nation building. Within a decade came a lapse into stasis, accounted for by the formalisation of opposed political interests, a cultivation of traditions intended to lift justice and administration above such claims, and the settling of a policy orthodoxy aimed at ameliorating the causes that might advantage one or other of those interests. At several points - most notably in the 1940s, the 1960s and the 1980s - a surge of initiative returned, often in recognition that the balancing and bargaining points of political legitimacy had shifted. Show more