From Black Jack McEwen to the Cairns Group Reform in Australian agricultural policy

Abstract

[Introduction]: ...This paper describes how Australia moved from an interventionist agricultural policy to the leadership of the Cairns Group during the Uruguay Round. It discusses the dismantling of price supports, stabilisation schemes and the myriad of other government interventions in agriculture and suggests that this process was facilitated by timely political developments which allowed agricultural economists to gain the reform for which they had been calling for years. Following Kingdon (Kingdon 1995), the paper suggests that agricultural economists responded to the policy opportunities offered by political change and were able to pursue their approach to agricultural reform effectively. This change, initially in the form of the 1972 Labor government, produced institutional developments that contributed to a significant shift in the structure of the policy community—the emergence of a market-oriented National Farmers’ Federation—and allowed the new approach to become entrenched.