Alternative
Australias
|
|
2001
Joint Academies' Symposium
11-12
November 2001
Rydges
Canberra & Shine Dome
C
A N B E R R A
Academy
for the Social Sciences
Academy of the Humanities
|
DOWNLOAD ABSTRACTS (PDF):
<Sunday
Program (47kb)> <Joint
Academies Program (85kb)>
In his 1992 book The End of Certainty, journalist and Fellow of
the Australian Academy of Social Sciences Paul Kelly described
as ‘the Australian Settlement’ the post-Federation policies of:
wage protection (arbitration), trade protection, state paternalism,
imperial benevolence and immigration restriction (the White Australia
policy). His thesis was that in the 1980s both the Labor and the
two conservative parties turned against each of the five elements
of the settlement. As a threat to the older institutional guarantees
of Australians’ economic security, this unmaking has been deplored
by some as heartless and dogmatic (and blamed for provoking ‘Hansonism’)
and celebrated by others as an unavoidable leap from fearful insularity
to robust cosmopolitanism.
In the second term of the Howard government there are signs that
Australia’s political elite is undecided about which of these
contrasting perspectives it should adhere to in rhetoric and in
policies.
As well as the issues of political economy thrown up by the unmaking
of the settlement, there is much debate about questions of national
identity that have also become unsettled since the 1970s: the
Republic, the meaning of reconciliation and the possibility of
an Indigenous treaty, the entailments of multiculturalism in both
domestic social policy and international policy (refugees). Sometimes
these issues of identity politics seem to occupy a distinct zone
of our public sphere. However, the affinities between rhetorics
of cultural diversity and rhetorics of a more open and deregulated
political economy are striking. To explore these affinities is
one of the challenges of our joint symposium.
The timing for a discussion of these themes a few weeks either
side of a Federal Election could hardly be better.
Download Symposium Flyer & Program in PDF
| HIGH RESOLUTION
(3.6mb) | LOW RESOLUTION (468kb)
|
Download Registration Form in PDF
| FELLOWS REGISTRATION,
for all Academy meetings (30kb) |
| NON-FELLOWS REGISTRATION, to
the Symposium only (35kb) |
