In the Land Down Under, Sydney:
Promise Fulfilled?
Edward J. Dodson
[A paper written in partial compliance for the course "Great
Cities
of the World" at Temple University, 1989]
PART ONE
Note: footnotes and references have been removed from
this posted version of the paper
ABSTRACT
The degree to which a society establishes and protects the condition
of equality of opportunity for its members is primarily a function of
the socio-political arrangements under which nature (as the source of
all we produce) and actual production come to be treated as either
public or private property. Traditional arrangements or those imposed
by the victorious over the vanquished have, with rare exception,
sanctioned hierarchically determined distributions of wealth and power
in society. The Australian experience is one characterized by the
transfer of a highly structured European system of socio-political
arrangements to a resource-rich, largely virgin frontier, secured at
minimal cost from its indigenous population. This paper identifies and
examines those arrangements and their impact on equality of
opportunity for Australians in general and, more particularly, on
those who have resided in the southeastern section of Australia
surrounding the modern metropolitan area of Sydney.
INTRODUCTION
When the first Europeans set foot on the Australian continent in
1788, the indigenous population whom we now call Aborigines numbered
some 300,000 and lived as hunter-gatherers in small, isolated groups.
Arthur Phillip, leader of the first expedition and Australia's first
governor, estimated the Aboriginal population living in the immediate
vicinity at around 1,500. Their system of socio-political arrangements
was, to say the least, strikingly different from that of the new
arrivals. As described by historian Robert Hughes, they "lived in
a state approaching that of primitive communism":
No property, no money or any other visible medium of
exchange; no surplus or means of storing it, hence not even the
barest rudiment of the idea of capital; no outside trade, no
farming, no domestic animals, except half-wild camp dingoes; no
houses, clothes, pottery or metal; no division between leisure and
labor, only a ceaseless grubbing and chasing for subsistence foods.
...They did not even appear to have the social divisions that had
been observed in other tribal societies such as those in America or
Tahiti. Where were the aboriginal kings, their nobles their priests,
their slaves? They did not exist.
More than anything else, the Aborigines had remained connected to the
land they traversed in their practice of a wholly nomadic existence.
The newly-arriving Europeans, long practiced in the arts of
agriculture and manufacture, were territorial in a very different
sense. The European aristocracy had successfully acquired control over
most of Europe's land mass over the previous four or five centuries;
private property in land had replaced feudal obligations and systems
of positive law supplanted the common law. Under such socio-political
arrangements the same process of enclosure that had displaced
millions of peasants in Europe could have had no outcome other than
the destruction of the Aborigine. The character of those who came
first from the British Isles merely shortened the time required for
the process of conquest and subordination to be completed.
After losing thirteen of their North American colonies, the British
were hard pressed to find a place to send a growing population of
criminals and political dissidents. Australia, at the very edge of the
known world and beyond the reach of competing Old World empires,
seemed an ideal place. James Cook had set the stage in 1770 with a
brief landing on the Australian coast on the return portion of his
voyage to New Zealand.
By the mid-1780s Britain was running out of prison space and the
Parliament was not inclined to appropriate additional sums to lessen
overcrowding. In this atmosphere of fiscal concern, a plan to
establish a penal colony at Botany Bay on the southeastern coast of
Australia was approved. Under Captain Arthur Phillip, eleven ships
carrying 1,500 passengers and crew (including 736 convicts) left
Britain in 1787 for the colony of New South Wales on the Australian
continent.
The make-up of even the first true settlers was in many ways quite
different from those who a century and a half earlier had made their
way to North America. The latter had largely been experienced farmers
and merchants, while the first group of colonists in Australia were
urban dwellers who possessed none of the skills required to tame a
virgin land. Several decades went by, in fact, before sheep farming
was successfully introduced and gave the colonists a "non-perishable"
export crop of wool for which they could acquire desperately needed
manufactured goods.
Almost from the beginning, a few enterprising individuals were able
to manipulate and coerce the Royal Governors into giving them large
land grants and a monopoly over the colony's first real currency --
rum. Although the Aborigines proved less numerous and less fierce than
the indigenous tribes of North America, barely a handful of free
settlers had moved inward from the coast to make their livelihoods as
yeoman farmers. Drought and insects plagued these settlers and
prevented agriculture from expanding. Not until 1813 was a pass was
finally found through the coastal mountain range that runs north and
south beyond Sydney close to Australia's eastern shore. From then on
cattle and sheep spread throughout the virgin grasslands.
As seemed to be the perpetual circumstance, British attentions were
largely diverted from its distant colony by social unrest at home and
warring with France and Spain. Because of the nature of Australia's
convict settlers (130,000 arrived over the first thirty years), the
mother country's political institutions could not be replicated for
some time. Government during this period meant military control.
Planning for the future was on the minds of some early arrivals, the
most important of whom was Edward Gibbon Wakefield who, in 1836,
founded the colony of South Australia, A radical-Whig reformer,
Wakefield sought to create in Australia a much more egalitarian
society than had thus far evolved in Britain. His plan included the
sale of land to yeoman farmers and the use of the proceeds to develop
the societal infrastructure necessary to attract business. Within a
few short decades after Wakefield's plan was put into action, German
immigrants had planted extensive vineyards in the colony; others had
introduced extensive wheat farming. South Australia thus became the
continent's early bread basket. Adelaide, planned in 1836 under a grid
system and surrounded by parkland, became the administrative center
for South Australia. Australian economist O.H.K. Spate noted,
interestingly, that Adelaide, "unlike Sydney and Melbourne, was
founded by gentlemen for gentlemen."
A degree of self-government came to New South Wales and to Sydney in
the 1820s. At the time there were only about 23,000 settlers and
convicts in all of Australia. The free colonists, the first generation
of Australian-born beginning to contribute their own energy to the
process of taming this new continent, gained a voice through the
establishment of executive and legislative councils. Equally
important, the military governor turned part of his power over to a
separate judiciary. As immigration continued, bringing businessmen and
educated professionals from Britain, political power began a gradual
shift to Sydney and the other fledgling colonial capitals -- where
government officials and large landowners ran the colonies.
Gradual, orderly development and expansion were short-lived under the
guidance of the wealthy landed class. The reason was gold, the
discovery of which in New South Wales and its southern neighbor,
Victoria, brought to Australia some 800,000 new immigrants between
1850 and 1860. As the gold fields quickly emptied, both the few
successful and the many unsuccessful miners turned to the frontier for
land or the few cities for wage-labor. Thus began an intense era of
land speculation in the two colonies that drove wheat farmers onto
extremely marginal land and shortly thereafter into bankruptcy. By the
1870s, some 18 million acres of land in New South Wales had come under
the control of around 550 individuals. To put this into some
perspective, only 30 million acres (or 1.6 percent of the Australian
continent) is adequately fertile and receives sufficient rainfall to
support agriculture. With most of the arable land so tightly
controlled, the coastal cities quickly grew into the few metropolitan
centers -- Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney. By contract, even
as late as the 1870s in the United States the majority of the
population was engaged in agriculture on land they owned. In
Australia, the majority of the population was urban and employed by
others.
SOCIALISM AND LIBERALISM COLLIDE
The great increase in immigration to Australia occurred during a
period of dramatic social and political change. By the time the
immigrants arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century, the
land of Australia and control over its socio-political institutions
were firmly entrenched in other hands. Britain had rid itself not only
of criminals but of many political radicals who brought with them to
Australia very strong trade-unionist sentiments and a militancy traced
to their origins as propertyless factory laborers. Conflict between
these newer arrivals and the entrenched groups was inevitable. Tracing
the origins of Australia's radical political culture, Professor
Richard Rosecrance of the University of California wrote in 1964:
Australian settlements ... had been formed out of the
crucible of British social ferment. Australian colonization followed
the Industrial Revolution in Britain and reflected many of the
social innovations which it had made. The development of large-scale
enterprise, the deplorable conditions of work in the factories and
mines, and the high tariff on the import of grain had created a
class which, if it did not fundamentally repudiate the liberal
philosophy, at least desired a radical transformation of the theory
of liberalism in the direction of greater social and political
justice.
Unlike the heartland of the United States or Canada, the Australian
frontier was not to serve as a safety valve for an increasing
population. The newly born and newly arrived were forced to stand and
fight for their rights in the urban centers. For its part, the mother
country conceded an ever-greater degree of self-government to its
colony and, quite differently from its actions in North America,
allowed policies of salutary neglect to evolve into virtual
independence.
The urban wage-laborers united in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century to bring substantive changes to Australian socio-political
arrangements. By 1875 the crafts unionists had won an eight hour day;
more radical unionists were organizing miners and workers in the wool
industry. The next phase was in the political arena, where the Sydney
Trades Council produced from its own ranks candidates for the
parliament of New South Wales. Also a powerful force in Australian
politics by the late 1880s were the so-called single-taxers, who had
become absorbed by the free trade agenda put forth by the U.S.
newspaper editor, political economist and reformer Henry George.
George's great work, Progress And Poverty (1879), had caused
quite a stir in both Britain and Australia; and, while on a lecture
tour of the British Isles in 1889, Henry George had been invited to
Australia by Charles L. Garland, a member of the Parliament of New
South Wales and President of the Sydney Single Tax Association. George
arrived in Sydney in March 1890 and embarked on a tireless campaign to
carry his message across the continent. After Sydney and Adelaide he
arrived in Melbourne and spoke to a crowded City Hall audience:
I am a free trader -- a free trader absolutely. I should
abolish all revenue tariffs. I should make trade absolutely free
between Victoria and all other countries. I should go further than
that. I should abolish all taxes that fall upon labour and capital
-- all taxes that fall upon the products of human industry, or any
of the modes of human industry. How then should I raise needed
revenues? I should raise them by a tax upon land values,
irrespective of improvements, a tax that would fall upon the holder
of a vacant plot of land near the city as heavily as upon like land
upon which a hundred cottages stood.
Australia had already achieved recognition as the first social
democracy to adopt the secret ballot, and now the reformers had
received from Henry George a treatise and alternative to classic
liberalism that called for an end to either private or state
monopolies and toward achievement of liberty as the road to justice.
The single-taxers, most of whom were from the middle classes, viewed
with great suspicion and danger the rising tide of Fabian socialism
that had come to Australia from England. Through the efforts of the
single-taxers, a tax on land values had already been imposed by the
government of South Australia in 1885 and was adopted by New South
Wales a decade later. Then, in 1906, Sir Joseph Carruthers, the
Premier of New South Wales, orchestrated passage of an act that
required "municipal and shire councils" to tax the "unimproved
capital value of all land except commons, public reserves and parks,
cemeteries, public hospitals, benevolent institutions, churches, ..,
free public libraries, the University of Sydney, and colleges
connected with it, and unoccupied crown lands". In 1909, Sydney
itself was given direct power to collect land taxes; then in 1917
Sydney, which had become a city of 700,000 people, eliminated all
taxes except those on land values. This measure had the effect of
socializing (at least some of) the economic value of land, while
allowing those who produce to retain or dispose of whatever they
produced in accordance with their individual desires. A real world
victory was achieved against land monopoly through the front door and
on behalf of just distribution of wealth. First, tentative steps
toward ending the redistribution of production from producers to
titleholders had been taken; nevertheless, Australia was to gradually
become a society where production became increasingly hampered by
heavy taxation and a heavy hand of government at the State and Federal
levels.
SIX NATIONS OR ONE?
By the turn of the century, New South Wales had become an island of
free trade surrounded by a sea of protectionist tariffs. This was a
major stumbling block as representatives from the colonies attempted
to forge a national government and constitution. As always, the large
landowners wanted as little direct democracy as possible and resisted
progressive changes in the national government that would diminish
their privilege in the colonial parliaments. When finally adopted in
1900, the constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia included the
provision that "trade, commerce and intercourse among the States
shall be absolutely free". Despite this constitutional
protection, a uniform system of tariffs was instituted.
As the twentieth century unfolded, the movement away from traditional
liberalism resulted in the adoption of a very nationalist and
seemingly pro-working man program. New laws placed stringent
limitations on immigration, balanced protectionism with binding
arbitration between industry and labor, and gave to the national
government an important role in the planning of industrial
development. Under the leadership of Andrew Fisher, the first solidly
Labour government took office in 1910:
... Labour set up the Commonwealth Bank, took over the
note issue, and introduced a land tax designed to assist in the
break-up of large holdings for closer settlement. But the major
items of its programme -- the general extension of Commonwealth as
against State economic powers, and the nationalisation of monopolies
-- were twice defeated in constitutional referenda; an attack at
once on States' Rights and free enterprise was too much for a
generally benevolent electorate.
The tenuous balance between conservative, liberal and radical
factions continued until the 1930s depression put one-third of
Australians out of work. Conservatives obtained reductions in existing
government subsidies and a balanced budget, and the economists pushed
the government to devalue the currency in an effort to make Australian
exports less expensive to its trading partners. As was the case in the
United States, the Second World War ended the lingering effects of the
depression, and Australia's cities became ever more important centers
of manufacturing activity. Also with the war, the Labour government
sought broad powers of nationalization in banking, broadcasting and
transportation, as well as the creation of a national social welfare
system. From the perspective of many conservatives and liberals,
Labour wanted to take the nation far along the path toward socialism.
Australians reacted negatively to this possibility, and in 1949
returned a Liberal government to power.
Australian political parties have long been associated with very
distinct public policy agendas, driven by a firm philosophical
orientation. Thus, the electoral process not only changes
administrations but the direction taken by government as well. Looking
back on two decades of Labour in power throughout the 1960s and 1970s,
one critic observed in a 1979 essay:
Instead of simply Justice, we now have a huge entangling
legal structure which gives a semblance of Justice for the rich and
the unscrupulous and provides for those unable to afford it for
themselves legal aid, an extension of welfare,
forced on the legal profession by a species of blackmail.
Instead of the Public Good we have a system which permits and
encourages the creation of giant monopolies by the protection given
them by a corrupt Parliament with the power to threaten
nationalisation. Instead of individual freedom we have a people
largely subdued and subjugated to the whim of officials, with the
right of appeal to pseudo-guardians (ombudsmen) set up at
public expense, to rescue the lucky ones from the effects of
mishandling by bureaucrats. As for the enjoyment of the fruits of
their labour, this is reduced by taxation, inflation and other
devices to a portion sufficient, in the case of the greater
proportion of the population, to maintain them at or a little above
the breadline, by the imposts of direct taxation of their incomes,
by indirect taxation on their food, clothing and other necessities
and by real estate taxes on their inevitably mortgaged homes.
These are the sentiments not of the radical left or the conservative
right but of the mainstream middle-class who have both benefited from
and been subjected to a gradual transformation of Australian society.
And yet, by most measurements of well-being, the Australian standard
ranks among the highest in the world.
PART
2
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